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Technographic research in onlineeducation: context, culture and ICTconsumptionSue Saltmarsh a , Wendy Sutherland‐Smith b & Simon Kitto b

a Charles Sturt University , Bathurst, Australiab Monash University , Victoria, AustraliaPublished online: 28 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: Sue Saltmarsh , Wendy Sutherland‐Smith & Simon Kitto (2008) Technographicresearch in online education: context, culture and ICT consumption, Asia-Pacific Journal of TeacherEducation, 36:3, 179-196, DOI: 10.1080/13598660802229932

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Technographic research in online education: context, culture and ICTconsumption

Sue Saltmarsha*, Wendy Sutherland-Smithb and Simon Kittob

aCharles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia; bMonash University, Victoria, Australia

(Received 3 March 2008; final version received 19 May 2008)

Technologically-mediated learning environments are an increasingly commoncomponent of university experience. In this paper, the authors consider how theinterrelated domains of policy contexts, new learning cultures and theconsumption of information and communication technologies might be exploredusing the concept of technography. Understood here as a term referring to ‘‘theapprehension, reception, use, deployment, depiction and representation oftechnologies’’ (Woolgar, 2005, pp. 27–28), we consider how technographic studiesin education might engage in productive dialogues with interdisciplinary researchfrom the fields of cultural and cyber studies. We argue that what takes place inonline learning and teaching environments is shaped by the logics and practices oftechnologies and their role in the production of new consumer cultures.

Keywords: consumption; higher education; ICT; online learning; teachereducation; technography

Introduction

The expansion of new technologies in higher education internationally has provided

both opportunities and challenges for tertiary learning and teaching. This expansion

has been particularly noticeable within the field of education, which, according to a

2002 report commissioned by the Australian Federal Department of Education,

Science and Training (DEST), represented 17% of the 207 fully online courses

offered by Australian universities (Bell, Bush, Nicholson, O’Brien, & Tran, 2002).

These figures place education second only to the field of management and commerce

in the delivery of fully online courses, pointing to the increasing significance of new

technologies in the delivery of educational programs. However, despite the potential

of online education to expand the market presence of Australian universities – and

the programs of education faculties – in the global knowledge economy, educators

and critics have cautioned that insufficient attention has been paid to the problems,

tensions and long-term implications of learning and teaching in virtual environments

(Brabazon, 2002, 2007). The field of education has made a considerable contribution

to these debates, highlighting the need for more empirically informed and

theoretically nuanced research that will enable better understandings about how

online environments can best be utilised for educational purposes.

Currently, the literature indicates that numerous outstanding issues converge in

technologically-mediated learning environments within Australian higher education.

The first of these relates to the policy context, as competition within the sector drives

*Corresponding author. Email: ssaltmarsh@csu.edu.au

Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education

Vol. 36, No. 3, August 2008, 179–196

ISSN 1359-866X print/ISSN 1469-2945 online

� 2008 Australian Teacher Education Association

DOI: 10.1080/13598660802229932

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the development of online courses, which are often seen by managers and

administrators as a cost-effective means of content delivery that offers access and

flexibility to larger numbers of students. The push toward online learning continues

to encounter numerous obstacles, however, pedagogy and curriculum struggle to

keep pace with the needs and demands of new generations of techno-savvy students

of the ‘‘technological society’’ (Barry, 2001). The second set of issues relates to the

first, with questions being raised about the kinds of learner identities and learning

cultures that are emerging within what has been described as the ‘‘virtual university’’

(Robins & Webster, 2002). Educational potential for both learners and teachers is

inexorably shaped by the constraints and possibilities that accompany technologi-

cally-mediated modes of delivery. Realising this is particularly important with

respect to understanding the kind of learner and/or teacher it is possible to be as well

as the kind of learning and teaching cultures of which one might be a part.

Alongside the promise of online education to produce more engaging, equitable

and collaborative learning spaces, has grown the increasing awareness that their uses

by student-consumers may bear little resemblance to the those intended by

educational institutions (Kitto & Saltmarsh, 2007; Saltmarsh, 2004). These issues

highlight the need for greater understandings of the complex intersections between

what takes place in technologically-mediated learning environments and the other

physical, social and virtual spaces within which both students and educators

participate. To that end, we raise a third area of concern relating to the ways that

‘‘computational technologies model styles of thought’’ (Turkle, 2004, p. 99).

Understanding how logics of practice emerge in online environments invites

engagement with both the social semiotics of online environments (Cranny-

Francis, 2005) and ‘‘the relationship between metaphor, artefact and experience’’

that Daniel Downes (2005, p. 140) describes in terms of the ‘‘poetics of cyberspace’’.

In this paper, therefore, we take up a consideration of these convergences, with a

view to proposing new orientations to researching the place and function of online

learning within the field of teacher education. We deploy the concept of

technography, a term with multiple meanings across a range of disciplines, including

media ecology (Harris, 1997), medical anthropology (Mueller-Rockstroh, 2006),

economics (Henderson, 1995), philosophy (Hamacher, 1998) and social theory

(Latour, 1988, 1991) and described by Steve Woolgar (2005) as a term that ‘‘signals a

need to maintain a sceptical ethnographic attitude towards the technical object at the

very heart of the study, that is, towards claims about and representations of technical

capability and effect’’ (p. 28). Indeed, Woolgar’s earlier work with Bruno Latour

involved conducting a technography of a science lab, which provided a crucial and

influential account of how the activities of scientists are profoundly implicated in the

social construction of scientific ‘‘facts’’ (Vandenberghe, 2006, p. 74). Woolgar’s

explication of the term can be read in light of that earlier work and, in particular, to

its contribution to actor network theory. Specifically, he refers to technography as

referring more broadly to studies concerned with ‘‘the apprehension, reception, use,

deployment, depiction and representation of technologies’’ (Woolgar, 2005, pp. 27–

28). We find this description useful and make use of it here to encapsulate our

collective approach to inquiries into the relationship between key technological,

relational and contextual domains of online education. The purpose of techno-

graphic research is to draw on multiple lenses, as described, to interrogate both

process and practice in online learning environments. The function of technographic

180 S. Saltmarsh et al.

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analysis is to critically examine ways in which technology actively mediates in its

representations in online learning contexts.

In the following sections, we provide an overview of some of the key ways in which

online education continues to change the face of tertiary education. We begin with a

brief mapping of the global and local contexts within which online education continues

to be incorporated into Australian degree programs. We do so as a means of

highlighting the significance of economic and political imperatives not merely as drivers

of pedagogic and curricular change, but also as important factors to consider as part of

all research inquiries concerned with online learning. We then move on to consider calls

from European scholars for greater research focus on the new learning cultures that

continue to emerge as online education becomes more widespread and more deeply

entrenched within pedagogic spaces of the university. We synthesise key domains of

online learning cultures as identified in the literature and consider how the consumption

of information technologies beyond academic settings intersects with and informs

online education. Drawing on interdisciplinary research from education, cultural and

cyber studies, we aim to explore some of the conceptual, pedagogic and methodological

dilemmas that continue to vex the tasks of researching and teaching in online learning

environments. In so doing, we consider the possibilities offered by dialogues between

teacher education and interdisciplinary scholarship concerned with technology and

society. We argue that addressing the complexities of online education requires

multidimensional approaches attuned to the permeability of boundaries between online

learning and the practices and poetics through which identities and the social world are

made and re-made via broader online activity.

Contexts: online learning in Australian higher education

The case for interdisciplinary research approaches to online learning in the

Australian university sector begins, as outlined briefly above, with the extent of

growth in online modes of course delivery across a range of disciplinary fields.

Despite this growth, however, according to the 2005 Commonwealth report, Our

Universities: Backing Australia’s Future (Department of Education Science and

Training [DEST], 2005) online education has ‘‘yet to live up to its promise to

transform the teaching and learning process’’ (p. 215). This is particularly the case for

undergraduate studies, with the overwhelming majority of online courses delivered at

postgraduate level. While the report notes that a high proportion of undergraduate

units are web-supplemented, undergraduate courses comprise less than 10% of those

offered entirely online by Australian universities. Concurring with the earlier

Universities Online report (Bell et al., 2002), a number of factors are identified as

potential barriers to the mainstream implementation of online undergraduate

education as a major mode of delivery. These factors include: lack of institutional

and/or national strategies and infrastructure; unevenness of technological literacy

amongst academic staff; and changing student profiles and participation rates. Both

reports note that while many Australian tertiary institutions and academics have

taken an internationally-recognised lead in the up-take of new technologies, there

has yet to be widespread, systematic development in the organisation and delivery of

online teaching. Further, ‘‘there has been little evaluation of the full impact of online

learning on students, academics, institutional structures, policies and practices or

teaching and learning’’ (DEST, 2005, p. 218).

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In light of projected estimates of global growth in university education, Australia

can ill-afford to lag behind its competitors in the burgeoning online learning

industry. An indication of the potential for expansion is encapsulated here, in figures

provided to the Online Learning in a Borderless Market conference hosted by the

federal Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) in 2001:

For example, the number of students at universities globally is expected to double –from 42 million in 1990 to 97 million in 2010. By 2025 there will be 159 million universitystudents globally. In the US at the current time there are 90,000 courses delivered bydistance – not necessarily online, but with an online component. Seventy percent of USuniversities now offer online courses, with one-in-three teaching entire degrees online.This equates to 5.8 million students logging on. There is little doubt that learning is thebiggest business of the 21st century. ‘‘Webucation’’ is set to become part of aUS$740 billion global market. (Stewart, 2001, p. 35)

Figures from the Australian tertiary sector mirror this growth, with enrolment in

Australian tertiary education having increased by 33% between 1995 and 2003

(Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2007, p. 3). Of

particular interest here, Australian undergraduate taxpayer-supported places

increased by 10% between 1996 and 2005, with overseas students representingapproximately 25% of the 957,176 students enrolled in 2005 (OECD, 2007, p. x).

These figures have particular salience for teacher education, given the prominence of

education amongst those disciplinary fields with the highest representation of online

courses. According to the Universities Online report (Bell et al., 2002), the disciplines

most widely represented in online course delivery are: (1) education; (2) health; (3)

management and commerce; and (4) society & culture. In addition to increased

numbers of undergraduate students are increased numbers of offshore enrolments.

For example, in 2005, DEST reported that nearly 64,000 overseas students enrolledin Australian universities were studying offshore, representing 27% of the total

overseas students and more than double the number enrolled offshore in 2000

(OECD, 2007, pp. xiii–iv). Such figures give an indication of the significance of

research into Australian online learning and of the importance of developing more

sophisticated ways of analysing the barriers and facilitators to its widespread uptake

as a mainstream mode of delivery. While we acknowledge that offshore study does

not necessarily equate to online study, increasingly the delivery of distance education

includes substantial online components.Not only have Australian enrolments increased, but changing patterns of

participation and student profiles amongst students have also been well-documented.

For example, there has been a marked increase in student preferences for flexibility,

such that in 2004–2005, 45% of domestic students had attendance patterns other

than internal full-time (OECD, 2007). Additionally, increasing numbers of full-time

students are also in paid employment, with a 9% increase recorded between 1994 and

1999 (Bell et al., 2002; McInnes et al., 2000). Some have suggested (Spender, 2001)

that consumer demand places increasing pressure on universities to deliver thedesired educational ‘‘products’’ to ‘‘global learning shoppers’’ with access to online

learning opportunities that can be tailored to their own and their employers’

requirements. Indeed, critics of distance education offered via online learning have

been quick to make the point that ‘‘the current mania for distance education is about

the commodification of higher education’’ (Noble, 2002, p. 282).

Recent research has considered the problematic aspects of the reconfiguration of

higher education in commodity terms (Bok, 2003; Kenway et al., 2006; Saltmarsh,

182 S. Saltmarsh et al.

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2004) with increasing reliance on technological delivery of content and assessment

playing a role in a range of undesirable learning and teaching practices (Kitto &

Saltmarsh, 2007). We are not, therefore, advocating what has been referred to as a

‘‘technological fix’’ (Ryan, 2001, p. 34) to problems of addressing market demand for

online courses, nor are we suggesting an injudicious implementation of online

delivery of courses at the expense of quality curriculum and pedagogy (Brabazon,

2002, 2007; Hase & Ellis, 2001). Rather, we would suggest that in order for

Australian online learning to maintain a sustainable future in the global education

marketplace, it will be important to address calls for research that attend to the full

complement of factors that drive, shape, facilitate and constrain the quality and

effectiveness of existing and emergent online programs. As noted in the OECD

Thematic Review of Tertiary Education in 2007:

Sustainability of the higher education system is said to be achieved by institutions thatare value adding, learner-centred, high quality, equitable, responsive, diverse,innovative, flexible, cost-effective, publicly accountable and socially responsible.(OECD, 2007, p. 8)

It is important to bear in mind that these general goals identified by government are

neither politically nor ideologically neutral and to be reminded that existing

dilemmas associated with online education have been broadly identified by research

conducted since the 1990s. We are mindful that there is a complex interplay between

what policy makers and administrators envisage, what curriculum developers,

software designers and pedagogues deliver and what students make or do with the

conceptual, technological, relational and subjective components of online learning

environments. In particular, existing research highlights tensions and dilemmas

across three primary domains: macro-level drivers of online delivery of university

courses, meso-level contextual factors within which online university learning is

situated and micro-level features of the online learning environments themselves.

Here we have provided only a brief mapping of the macro-level drivers of Australian

online education as a way of highlighting the extent to which learning and teaching is

situated within – and never free of – broader concerns of political economies.

With respect to teacher education, it is important to bear in mind that the

political and economic imperatives driving the expansion of online learning intersect

at critical points with the politically situated (dare we say, charged) field of teacher

education. For example, the use of information and communication technology has

now been designated a ‘‘basic skill’’ for Australian primary and secondary school

students, hence as a crucial component of teacher education programs as mandated

by government and statutory accreditation bodies such as the New South Wales

Institute of Teachers and the Victorian Institute of Teaching (Pearson, 2003). Thus,

the intersection of technological literacies, professional learning and the potential for

online learning environments to support and extend them collide with the policy

context through which they are effectively mandated (Otteson, 2006). This

intersection of policy with practice raises important questions about the kinds of

tertiary experiences encountered by teacher education students. How, for example,

are students’ engagements with ICTs shaped by their awareness of formal

requirements of government and accrediting bodies? How is the provision of

particular kinds of technologically-mediated learning experiences shaped by these

same requirements and how are pedagogies and curricula shaped in response?

Importantly, how might tactical practices of resistance to political imperatives and

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pedagogic strategies reconfigure the problems and possibilities of online learning?

While it is not our aim here to attempt answers to such questions, we raise them to

show the permeability of boundaries between policy and practice and the

incommensurability of understanding one without attending to the other.

Learning and teaching techno/cultures

The policy context described above has been accompanied by, and given rise to,

numerous changes to teaching and learning practices (Land & Bayne, 2004). These

changes have led to a proliferation of research concerned with the curricular and

pedagogic implications of online learning, which particularly lend themselves to a

technographic revisioning. In this section of the paper, we consider questions

pertaining to what Timothy Luke (2002) refers to as ‘‘university technocultures’’, in

order to highlight the importance of research approaches that systematically draw

together the political, cultural, pedagogical and technological elements of online

learning. Recent European scholarship (Kuure, Saarenkunnas, & Taalas, 2000, 2002;

Otteson, 2006; Saarenkunnas, 2004; Saarenkunnas, Kuure, & Taalas, 2003) for

example, suggests an urgent need for empirical research into the new learning

cultures that emerge in response to tertiary e-learning environments.

Here we understand the concept of new learning cultures as encompassing ‘‘how

students and teachers use various tools in their everyday teaching and studying lives

and how the meaning of computer-supported projects is constructed’’ (Saarenkunnas

et al., 2003).

This definition represents a significant departure from notions of ‘‘community’’

in online learning contexts (Soderstrom, Hamilton, Dahlgren, & Hult, 2006), by

placing emphasis on how the everyday uses and meanings associated with

technologically-assisted learning become established as taken-for-granted assump-

tions, values and practices in learning institutions (Otteson, 2006). This is not to

diminish or negate what has been described as ‘‘online communities of practice’’

within teacher education (Kirschner & Lai, 2007), but, rather, it is to suggest the

notion of learning techno/cultures as referring to technologically-mediated practices

and orientations that endure beyond the immediacy of groups, classes and peer

networks that are formed for particular learning purposes. This has clear

implications for developing curriculum, assessment and teaching approaches based

upon the actual practices of students (McAlpine, 2004; Saunders & Klemming, 2003)

and for cultivating institutional cultures that are best equipped to reflect upon, and

respond to, the demands of continually changing tertiary learning environments

(Davis, 2003).

In thinking through the implications of researching new learning techno/cultures

in teacher education, we consider three themes that recur in the international

literature and explore how they might be helpful when viewed through a

technographic lens. These themes, each of which can be interpreted as fundamental

to programs and practices within teacher education, include: learning and teaching

practices; collaboration and the formation of social networks; and the entrepreneur-

ial use of technologies. We see each of these three domains as interconnected, with

online technologies playing an active part in shaping the practices and production of

meanings that take place in each domain of inquiry. In this view, online educational

technologies are not seen merely as tools to support learning, nor as merely

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providing the social contexts that precede learning (Edwards, 2005). Rather, we see

online learning technologies as operating, through the everyday practices of teachers

and learners, as ‘‘a productive force that impacts on the concept and practice of the

university as an institution’’ (Kitto & Saltmarsh, 2007, p. 156). Thus, the

technographic orientation to researching various aspects of online education that

we are suggesting is fundamentally concerned with understanding the role of

technology use in its broadest sense in the production of institutional cultures.

The literature concerning technologically-mediated learning and teaching practices

makes a compelling case for considering subject areas as productive of distinctive

cultures. Peter John and Linda Baggott la Velle (2004), for example, argue that through

what they term ‘‘subject subcultures’’ – in other words, organisational practices,

individual biographies and collective experience – are reinforced by generations of

institutional practice ‘‘typified by a continuous distribution of knowledge over time’’.

The academic and professional values held by pre-service teaching students have been

shown to be crucial to the effectiveness of ICT use in learning contexts. Factors such as

attitudes to change, valued expertise, reflective practice and commitments to

professional learning, play an important role in many facets of both ICT use and

subject specific learning cultures (Mumtaz, 2000; Watson, 2001). Otteson (2006) has

suggested that cultural continuities are associated with professional networks and

workplace practices. We concur with these views, to which we would add that the

cultural practices associated with substantive fields are subject to significant variation

and transformation through the introduction of, and challenges presented by, new

technologies. Here again, we suggest that understanding the policy-culture-technology

nexus as it both precedes and exceeds the tertiary learning environment requires

research approaches that can account (at least partially) for the co-implication of

context, practice, tools and text in the production of social meanings and identities.

Yet, as Paul Kirschner and Kwok-Wing Lai (2007) have observed, there remains

a curious disjuncture between research on ICT, teacher education and teacher

learning. They argue that ‘‘On one side of this abyss is mainstream teacher education

research, which apparently does not really pay attention to ICT. On the other side

are researchers studying ICT, who apparently pay little attention to research

conducted on teacher education’’ (p. 127). While there are notable exceptions to such

claims, they nonetheless raise important issues for teacher education, where, despite

widespread acknowledgement that ICT use is increasing as well as increasingly

important, concerns have been raised about its relative absence from major teacher

education reviews (Kirschner & Lai, 2007). Writing with respect to Australian

teacher education, John Pearson (2003) observes that much of the ICT-related

learning that has taken place in Australian teacher education and professional

development has involved learning about ICT – in other words, the ‘‘how to’’ of

technology use associated with content delivery and curriculum planning. However,

he argues that an increasing emphasis on learning with ICTs is necessary for bringing

about the anticipated pedagogic changes promised by new technologies (Pearson,

2003). Importantly, Pearson makes the link between those learning and teaching

strategies developed within the contexts of teacher education programs to what takes

place in schools and classrooms once teachers enter the profession. This is supported

by recent UK research that highlights the important connections between student

teachers’ levels of competence and interest in ICTs and those of their teacher

mentors (Cuckle & Clarke, 2003).

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The links between teacher education programs and workplace practices and

teachers’ ICT-related expertise and interests, raise the issue of collaboration and the

formation of social networks as a second, albeit closely related, domain of techno/

learning cultures that has attracted attention from education scholars internation-

ally. Allen Thurston (2005), for instance, makes an explicit link between learning the

skills of collaboration and communication with pedagogic practice and disciplinary

knowledge, suggesting that ‘‘learners co-construct new understanding by building on

existing knowledge through peer interaction. This allows students to form common

interpretations of meaning through social interaction’’ (p. 357). While there have

been numerous studies of student collaborations and peer networks in tertiary online

educational environments, what we want to raise here is that such interactions exist

within a much broader domain of technologically-mediated social relations. Douglas

Kellner, for example, observes that:

As technologies like computers, telephones, televisions and new multimedia devicesconverge, computer-mediated culture will increasingly provide an encompassingenvironment in which people work, play, relate, learn and interact. Becomingcomputer-literate in this broad sense thus requires expanding notions of literacy andlearning how to communicate, interact and create in novel cybercultures. (Kellner, 2004,p. 20)

Understanding the techno/learning cultures that emerge in online learning

environments, then, increasingly requires research engagement that extends well

beyond the immediate interactions between students, or between students and

lecturers. Such an approach would encompass not just policy and educational

contexts, but the techno/cultural contexts and logics of practice that shape

everyday understandings, communications and identities. As Downes (2005)

observes, ‘‘How we characterise the social groupings we seek through computer-

mediated communication reflects our assumptions about technology and the

degree to which we have incorporated them into our repertoire of basic

metaphors’’ (p. 100).

With respect to the entrepreneurial use of technologies, there is another curious

disjuncture in the literature. On the one hand, there is increasing evidence that

students and educators are making greater use of ICTs in their teaching and learning

practices. It perhaps goes without saying that many university students ‘‘have

increasingly good IT skills, which they use extensively in academic work’’ (Szabo &

Underwood, 2004). The extent and sophistication with which both students and

educators make use of new technologies is an important means by which educational

cultures are transformed. Writing from the Norwegian context, for example, Eli

Otteson (2006) notes that practices such as internet use ‘‘[challenge] conventions of

practice’’ (p. 283), altering the power dynamics between learners and educators, with

implications for identities and social relations. Diamond and Adam (2004) take up a

similar concern, noting that: ‘‘As technology continues to transform our conceptions

of knowledge and information, notions about learning and ‘expertise’ shift as well.’’

However, despite the increasingly innovative and entrepreneurial ICT use that has

been documented in the tertiary sector, Diamond and Adam (2004) also reiterate a

view held by many that ‘‘higher education has not changed along with its students

and environment.’’ They are supported by Neil Selwyn’s (1999, 2007) observation

that the education sector has traditionally been wary of technological innovation, an

observation echoed by others (Swain, 2006). This disjuncture in the literature marks

186 S. Saltmarsh et al.

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an apparent gap – with innovation and entrepreneurial ICT use on one hand, and

resistance and reluctance on the other – that merits consideration in relation to

teacher education. In particular, it raises important questions about the kinds of

research questions that might be asked concerning the practices of those students

and educators who employ technologies in innovative ways and those cultural and

institutional factors that act as potential barriers to socio-technological change

within the sector (Cuckle & Clarke, 2003; Davis, 2003; Diochon & Cameron, 2001;

Gale & Kitto, 2003).

We note with interest, in relation to our own experiences in teacher education

classrooms, how such a disjuncture can play out in teaching and learning contexts.

We regularly see our students bringing technological skills and practices from

everyday life to learning activities such as locating information online and

developing class presentations. For example, many of our students are adept at

incorporating multi-media texts from popular sites such as MySpace and YouTube

into ‘‘slick’’ Power Point presentations and at locating and sharing information

online. Yet we also regularly observe a reluctance (and at times resistance) amongst

students to take the kinds of intellectual, technological and social risks that ideally

accompany learning with technology. For example, we find it perplexing that some

of the very students who demonstrate high levels of skill in locating online

information using general search engines, openly resist using databases to locate

scholarly books or journal articles. A particular problem for teacher education, it

would seem, is the need for teaching approaches that might best facilitate the

incorporation of pre-service teachers’ informal technology use into those practices

that are both useful and valued in academic contexts. For example, locating

scholarly research from credible sources; synthesising and presenting scholarly

information in ways that are accurate, engaging and meaningful; and collaborating

in ways that support and enhance their scholarly learning. While there is little doubt

that such intersections occur, our respective research in the areas of digital literacies

(Sutherland-Smith, 2002a, 2002b), plagiarism (Saltmarsh, 2004; Sutherland-Smith,

2005, 2008) and assessment (Kitto & Saltmarsh, 2007) shows that consumerist

orientations and neoliberal rationalities at play in the lives of our students can lead

to mobilisation of technology and of the educational environments themselves in

ways that undermine the learning process (Kitto & Saltmarsh, 2007).

Within each of these domains we see a range of complexities in circulation that

pose vexing methodological questions. For example, alongside the policy contexts

and global consumer demand driving online learning, how will learning techno/

cultures within the field of teacher education evolve and how might they be

effectively critiqued? Further, how might the role of technologically-mediated

learning be interrogated in dialogue with analyses of the computational and

representational technologies themselves, as well as the uses to which they are put

by student consumers of ICTs? In the final section of the paper, we draw on

examples from our own experience within online teaching environments as a

starting point for thinking through how a technographic orientation might be

employed in analysing the various layers of technologically-mediated learning

environments. In so doing, we argue that what takes place in online learning and

teaching environments is inexorably shaped by the logics and practices of

computational technologies and their place in the production of contemporary

consumer cultures.

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ICT consumption and online learning

As discussed in the previous sections of this paper, the technographic approach to

researching technologically-mediated learning environments brings together a range

of policy, pedagogic and cultural concerns as intersecting domains of inquiry.

Returning to Woolgar, we are reminded that:

Interpretation, reading and making sense of technology are a constant feature of sociallife. Technologies are not a given. Instead they are discursive moves in a never-endingcacophony of efforts at social ordering. (Woolgar, 2005, p. 29)

In this final section, we provide examples from our own online learning

environments, discussed in relation to login pages from popular websites, in order

to show how some of the rationalities and logics of the on-screen environment

intersect with some of the broader contextual and cultural issues we have raised.

While space does not permit a full exegesis, the following examples provide a starting

point for considering how technographic approaches might contribute to fuller

understandings of tertiary online learning environments currently available to

students in teacher education programs.

When students enrolled in subjects taught by one of the authors (SS) logged into

their subject websites at the beginning of semester this year, they found a page very

similar to the one in Figure 1 on their screens:

Drawing on the work of Anne Cranny-Francis (2005) and Espen Aarseth (1997)

we want to consider briefly how the visual elements of this particular cybertext (and

the one to which it will be compared) construct meanings and subject positionings

for its users. Aarseth (1997) uses the term ‘‘cybertext’’ to refer to the wide range ‘‘of

possible textualities seen as a typology of machines, as various kinds of literary

communication systems where the functional differences among the mechanical

parts play a defining role in determining the aesthetic process’’ (p. 22). In this sense,

the cybertext of the login page is understood as an active, rather than a neutral or

Figure 1. Interact login.

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objective, part of the exchange between students, teachers, designers and subject

content.

In particular, we are interested in the ways in which online environments such as

this one visually situate learners in relation to the two broad domains discussed in

the previous sections – i.e. the global knowledge economy and university techno/

cultures.

Visual elements such as the vertical arrangement of words in interactive columns

on the left and the horizontal arrangement of interactive tabs across the top (but

below the banner) do more than merely organise words and icons on the screen. As

Anne Cranny-Francis (2005) points out, the visuality of written texts on-screen plays

an important part in constructing shared cultural values and meanings that accrue to

the text’s substantive content. In the example of the online login page, the visual

elements follow the logic of written representations in English – alphabetically

ordered and read from left to right, in the case of the tabs, or from top to bottom in

the case of the side menu. Beginning with the banner that occupies the top portion of

the page, the university logo occupies a significant position in the top left hand

corner. For Western readers, this is a position of visual primacy, signifying the

‘‘beginning’’ of written texts. Locating the logo in this position thus overlays the logic

of literacy with that of corporate branding – the literate reader thus tacitly begins

their negotiation of this particular text with a logo that is widely used to position the

university within the global knowledge economy.

Additionally, from their respective computer screens, the students may scroll

down an interactive list of pages available via the Interact site. Among these are links

to an electronic assignment submission and tracking system and to student access to

subject evaluation. Far from ideologically neutral, the electronic tracking of student

work and anonymous student evaluation of tertiary courses have become installed

within the Australian tertiary sector. Such systems are used as primary

‘‘technologies’’ (in the Foucaultian sense) for addressing, at least rhetorically, the

demands for efficiency, transparency and accountability that have emerged as

central organising principles in universities under neoliberal regimes of governance.

Our analysis should not be read as implying any impropriety on the part of

universities in their use of such systems – instead what we are endeavouring to show

is that the emergence of technologies in the context of broader political economies

and their convergence at the site of the online learning environment constructs

technologically-mediated learning in direct dialogue with the logics of Western

capitalism.

With regard to learning and teaching techno/cultures, we return the banner at the

top of the site as a starting point for thinking about how relations between the

learning institution, students and text are constructed. At the top centre of the screen

is the word Interact, placed to the left of two faint red arrows, and under which is the

tag-line ‘‘A scholarly community’’, which functions to: identify the software

platform; issue an implied directive to consumers of the text (to ‘‘interact’’); and

imply a dialogic engagement between users of the cybertext as part of a particular

community. In this sense, the textuality of the cybertext enters into dialogue with its

social and institutional context, as mediated by the functionality of, and access to,

computational technology. Returning once more to the interactive menu down the

left hand side of the page, we note that a number of the features available are

designed to facilitate communication: chat rooms, discussion forums and Wikis, for

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example, are designated communication tools. It is important to note that, as is the

case in other universities, all online subjects at the university are accessed via this

software platform. While individual lecturers may select or omit some of the tools,

there is general consistency in the appearance, layout and functionality of the

technologically-mediated learning environment. Thus, lecturers and students are

similarly constituted by the cybertext of the login page, calling to mind Downes’

observation that ‘‘Social construction is at a significant level about creating and

maintaining a sense of common reality – a social narrative of text, image, audio and

video collected in a vast interactive transcript.’’ (Downes, 2005, p. 123)

Constructions of social engagement via these educational texts have a number of

implications for technographic orientations to researching online education. In

particular, they highlight the importance of technogically mediated interactions to

the ways in which consumers of ICT engage with substantive, relational and

technological components of online learning. This can produce a range of effects in

the lived experience of students, whose online social activities and networks are

unlikely to be limited to those encountered in formally established online learning

environments. For example, in a US study conducted by Charles Crooks (2002), the

online activities of students studying in networked environments were found to be

‘‘highly interactive and mobile’’, with online conversational exchanges providing

considerable distraction to their formal learning activities. While Crooks acknowl-

edges the potential for such exchanges to enhance study practices, he also comments:

However, our records indicate that such agility was only occasionally exercised in theinterests of formal study. Instead, the strong impression was one of an interactivetechnology that somewhat undermined sustained periods of engagement with a singleacademic task or document. (Crooks, 2002, p. 118).

Such observations accord with our own and we would suggest that technographic

research approaches to understanding the processes and practices of online learning

must necessarily attend to the semiotics and poetics of multiple online texts and

communicative spaces as a starting point for understanding technology as both

‘‘material condition for experience’’ and as contributor ‘‘to the world we make’’

(Downes, 2005, p. 16). Technological environments, in other words, and the

interplay between them have an important role in the co-construction of self and

the social world, through both their representational and functional logics and the

uses to which they are put.

To use but one example, we offer a brief consideration of the current homepage

of myspace.com, where many of our students maintain personal pages documenting

their personal lives and interests and communicate with friends and fellow students

about planned social activities (see Figure 2).

Even a brief glance at the text invokes comparisons between the colourful and

highly interactive online text of the myspace.com homepage and the predominantly

white and grey tones and visually static menus and tabs of the online learning

environment. Whereas students in the formal learning site are presented with vertical

and horizontal menus for navigating the site and its contents, myspace.com invites

interaction through roll-over hyperlinks, videos, advertisements for cultural events,

celebrity news, job opportunities and numerous references to ‘‘friends’’. On the other

hand, the location of the myspace logo in the top left hand corner of the banner once

again highlights the primacy of corporate identity within the logics of written English

language literacy. On this site, however, consumers of the myspace site are addressed

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as both global consumers and producers of media texts – links to globally

recognisable music, comedy and celebrity features sit seamlessly alongside links to

email and amateur videos. Of particular interest, just as the login page of the online

learning site situates students within a metaphorical ‘‘community’’ mobilised around

the consumption and production of scholarship, the tag-line ‘‘a place for friends’’

situates visitors to the site within an implied, spatialised network of interpersonal

relations predicated on ‘‘friendship’’ that is mobilised around the consumption of

popular culture.

While it might be reasonably argued that these online spaces have very different

social functions – one being an engagement with formal learning processes and the

other being an engagement with popular culture – we contend that the logics of

Figure 2. MySpace login.

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visual representation and technologically-mediated communication across such sites

enables a better understanding of what takes place in each. Crooks and Light (2003)

take up similar issues in their discussion of the relationship between students’

informal cultural practices associated with online activities and the formalised

activities that comprise ‘‘study’’, which they situate as a cultural practice. In

particular, they argue that successful educational experiences require that the

practices of each must become visible in the repertoire of the other:

The enculturation of knowledge is then a subtle management of the interface betweenthe demands of the formal and the fluency of the informal. Successful educationinvolves making students comfortable with the activities demanded by formal study:encouraging them to allow their repertoire of informal practices – listening, talking,investigating and so on – to be formalised in ways that then support their learning.(Crooks & Light, 2003, p. 174)

To disengage investigations of formal learning from the contexts of informal

practices online is to risk overlooking the very skills, tools and systems of

signification that might otherwise be drawn upon as crucial resources in, and

explanatory frameworks for, the production of new learning cultures within the

broader context of the global expansion of online education.

Conclusion

For teacher education, the intersections between the broad domains of global and

institutional policy contexts, the ethnographic and relational domains of new learning

techno/cultures and the representational domains of both educational and other online

environments have yet to be fully examined. Yet, importantly, examining such

intersections may provide valuable insights into the kinds of generational and

institutional knowledges and practices that shape the ICT-related attitudes and

experiences of pre-service teachers, teacher educators and teacher mentors. While

technographic research orientations to such undertakings, in methodological terms,

might take a variety of forms, our aim in this paper has been to take some initial steps in

showing its usefulness for analysing the complex intersection of technologically-

mediated learning environments as they intersect with policy directions and cultural

practices. Using technography as an interdisciplinary means of exploring these

interrelated domains, we have provided some discussion of how technologies of online

education might be understood in terms of their contribution to institutional ‘‘social

orderings’’ (Woolgar, 2005, p. 27) that operate in dynamic dialogue with policy and

social contexts and, indeed, their uses by students/consumers. Gaining insights from

cyber and cultural studies, we argue that what takes place in the online learning and

teaching environments within teacher education is inexorably shaped by the logics and

practices of computational technologies and their place in the production of

contemporary consumer cultures. It is crucial that academics interrogate the

political-cultural-technological nexus in teacher education courses as universities move

quickly to expand online education courses.

Notes on contributors

Dr. Sue Saltmarsh is a senior lecturer in the School of Teacher Education at Charles Sturt

University, in Bathurst, Australia, where she teaches Cultural Politics of Education and

Qualitative Research Methodologies. Her research interests include higher education policy,

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the social production of subjectivities and cultural analysis of literary and visual texts. Sue’s

work on plagiarism, assessment and ICTs in higher education draws on her interests in

poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and power, with emphasis on how the marketisation

and internationalisation of higher education is implicated in producing economic subjectiv-

ities.

Dr Wendy Sutherland-Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash

University, Australia. She is actively involved in teaching online as well as face-to-face

undergraduate and post-graduate students. Her research interests centre on ethical relation-

ships and concepts of academic integrity. Her recently published book with Routledge

Plagiarism, the Internet and student learning: Improving academic integrity discusses the impact

of technology in academic writing and questions approaches to the learning and teaching

relationship.

Dr. Simon Kitto’s expertise in ICTs and curriculum development and delivery is recognised

nationally and internationally and he has conducted numerous invited presentations on these

issues in Medical Education, Education and Health Social Sciences settings. He has a

forthcoming book with NovaScience Publishers entitled: Pedagogical machines and the

governing of technological universities, which concerns the use of ICTs as pedagogical as well as

knowledge-objects of governing within Australian Universities.

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