New metaphors for understanding epistemic practices in higher education online settings (original) (raw)
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Actor network theory and the study of online learning
Quality education at a distance, 2003
How innovations in tertiary education are theorised and understood is important for both policy and practice. This paper describes an approach to studying innovation and change that is taken from the field of Science and Technology Studies. Actor-network theory draws attention to the performative nature of the implementation of new technologies like quality systems and online teaching. The theory posits that the world is not populated with entities that possess certain essences in and of themselves, but rather that the world is a texture of relations—a network—which occasionally produces the effect of stabilised entities. We examine the consequences of producing durable forms of online teaching and quality assurance and argue that contrary to popular claims about the benefits of these technologies that to achieve durable performances requires a conformity to existing performances of a university thus reproducing current patterns of inequity.
Multiple enactments? An Actor Network Theory approach to studying educational research practices
Actor Network Theory (ANT) is one of the more controversial approaches in social sciences. It arose in the early 1980s out of criticism towards the more traditional Sociology, which tended to disregard the role of the material and the natural in the constitution of ‘social reality’. In ANT terms, the social is not seen as the ‘glue’ holding society together, but as something made up of essentially non-social components (human, non-human, animate, inanimate entities) constituting networks of relations and being constituted by them. (Latour 2005, 4-5; Law 2007.) The main aim of ANT is to overcome the subject-object divide, the distinction between the social and the natural worlds and to see the reality as enacted. Over the years the ANT approaches have developed into various directions in the hands of different thinkers and disciplines. The aim of the paper is to disentangle some of the conceptual messiness of ANT while considering the potential of applying a strand of the approach in my PhD study, which is linked to an interdisciplinary (Education and Computer Sciences) research and development project Ensemble.
… 2010: Seventh International Conference on Networked …, 2010
Learning never was confined to classrooms. We all learn in, out of, before, during and after episodes of formal education. The changing sociotechnical context offers a promise of new opportunities, and the sense that somehow things may be different. Use of the Internet and other emerging technologies is spreading in frequency, time and space. People and organizations wish to use technology to support learning seek theories to frame their understanding and their innovations. In this article we explore Connectivism, that is positioned as a theory for the digital age, in use on a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, in 2008. We then compare Connectivism with another network theory, Actor Network Theory, to explore possible synergies. We found that Connectivism enables educators and learners to legitimise their use of technology to support teaching and learning. Connectivism, a relatively new theory, can benefit from a richer empirical base as it develops. Since the scope of educational change can vary from a specific learning setting through organisational and societal settings, we can develop theories through empirical exploration of cases across the range of settings to support our understanding and actions.
Students as actors in school networks. (2015) English version of ISSN: 2007-2686
In this article I pretend to expound some of the ideas originating from the Actornetwork theory (ANT) that have been utilized in education by anthropologist Jan Nespor, presently professor in the Ohio State University. In his work he studies the trajectory of students throughout their professional development, their career paths in research within college institutions and the extensive trajectories of grade school students. As an anthropologist he utilizes an ethnographic approach to research as conceived within the field of Science Studies, thus making his descriptions not only abound in detail but also in thorough analysis that transcends the macro-micro levels and the temporal dimension; it transfers the contributions of scientific practice studies to the student practice studies in academia; it explains how the transit of students through academic networks contributes to the redefinition of space, time, identity and the way in which knowledge constituted by school contents is displaced by students and teachers through the objects that represent them.
Introduction: Reclaiming and Renewing Actor Network Theory for Educational Research
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2010
Actor-network theory (ANT) continues to enjoy a lively trajectory in the social sciences since its emergence in the early 1980s at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI) of the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris. Largely associated with its progenitors in science and technology studies including Bruno Latour, John Law and Michael Callon, ANT has contributed an important series of analytic approaches and considerations that rupture certain central assumptions about knowledge, subjectivity, the real and the social. The focus is on the socio-material-and how minute relations among objects bring about the world. Analyses drawing upon ANT trace how different human and nonhuman entities come to be assembled, to associate and exercise force, and to persist or decline over time. Nothing is given or anterior, including 'the human', 'the social', 'subjectivity', 'mind', 'the local', 'structures' and other categories common in educational analyses. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, ANT figured prominently in studies published in sociology, technology, feminism, cultural geography, organization and management, environmental planning, and health care. With a few limited exceptions, however, educational research in the main has not demonstrated a similar enthusiasm in the uptake of ANT. We are among those who believe that ANT offers truly important insights about the processes and objects of education. This is in spite of, or actually partly because of, its mutations in the past two decades into a highly diffuse, diverse and contested set of framings and practices. Its own key commentators refuse to call it a 'theory' as though ANT were some coherent explanatory device. It may be more accurate to think of ANT as a virtual 'cloud', continually moving, shrinking and stretching, dissolving in any attempt to grasp it firmly. ANT is not 'applied' like a theoretical technology, but is more like a sensibility, a way to sense and draw (nearer to) a phenomenon. For educational researchers, as we argue in Fenwick & Edwards (2010) and Fenwick, et al. (2011), ANT's language can open new questions and its approaches can sense phenomena in rich ways that discern the difficult ambivalences, messes, multiplicities and contradictions that are embedded in so many educational issues. This book is an experiment, intended to engage readers in the question: What work can ANT do in educational research? To bring some focus to the book, we called for chapters addressing issues of educational change or reform. The authors employ a range of ANT constructs to explore and perform educational change in highly diverse manifestations: integration of new technology, a large-scale school improvement initiative, everyday curriculum enactments, development of international standardized tests, introduction of teacher evaluation systems, and implementation of a literacy program. Each author argues for the unique analysis that ANT approaches enable, yielding overall an important expansion of how we engage with educational change. While one object of each chapter is to show an ANT sensibility at work with a particular researcher in a particular environment of concerns, each also focuses, as ANT studies are expected to do, on tracing the rich material details of the actual actors and their story being followed by the researcher. The remainder of this introduction outlines ANT for those who may be newcomers to its ideas and approaches, and offers a glimpse of the chapters.
Actor-Network Theory and/as 'Global Social Theory'
Encyclopedia of Global Social Theory, 2023
Actor-network theory (ANT) took form in the 1980s at the Centre de Sociologie de l'innovation of the École des mines in Paris. Based on its strong thematic focus on technological development and scientific innovation, it came to play a crucial role in the emerging field of science and technology studies (STS). In conceptual terms, ANT quickly proved to be a more unusual beast than other sociological and historical approaches. Drawing eclectically on semiotics, ethnomethodology, and much else, it constructed an image of fluctuating networks comprised by human and nonhuman actors, which were, in turn, fully constituted by their mutual relations. This was a sociology of translations, which, though it has remained controversial, over time came to influence many disciplines beyond STS.
Actor network theory and the study of online learning: new perspectives on quality
2003
How innovations in tertiary education are theorised and understood is important for both policy and practice. This paper describes an approach to studying innovation and change that is taken from the field of Science and Technology Studies. Actor-network theory draws attention to the performative nature of the implementation of new technologies like quality systems and online teaching. The theory posits that the world is not populated with entities that possess certain essences in and of themselves, but rather that the world is a texture of relations-a network-which occasionally produces the effect of stabilised entities. We examine the consequences of producing durable forms of online teaching and quality assurance and argue that contrary to popular claims about the benefits of these technologies that to achieve durable performances requires a conformity to existing performances of a university thus reproducing current patterns of inequity.