Researching academic and digital literacies in the ...€¦ · students in association with digital technologies •Theoretical and methodological framework from academic literacies

Researching academic and digital literacies in

the university: considering texts, technologies

and practices

Mary R. Lea

[email protected]

The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology

Interrogating academic literacies and digital contexts

• Relationship between literacies and digital technologies

• Blurring boundaries between people/ texts/technologies

• How we get things done/ how things come into being through texts and practices in a

digital world

• Drawing on Actor Network Theory

• Interrogating familiar categories and binaries which underpin our work

• The potential value of a network approach


Digital literacies in higher education

http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/digital-

literacies/

• Focus on literacy practices, texts accessed, negotiated by

students in association with digital technologies

• Theoretical and methodological framework from academic

literacies

• Actor-Network Theory (ANT) – spheres for meaning making -

participants, modes and practices

• Lea M R. and Jones, S (2011) 'Digital literacies in higher education: exploring textual and

technological practice', Studies in Higher Education 36 (4) 377-395


What does academic literacies offer?

• Established theoretical and methodological frame

• Foregrounds issues of meaning making and identity

• Offers framing for asking critical questions about learning

and technologies

• Focus on textual encounters and significance for

participants

• Sees texts and practices as central to construction of

knowledge

• Importance of institutional context

Research approach • Ethnographic-style

• Drawing on academic literacies research

• 3 institutions – diverse HE contexts

• 45-32 students

• Smalltown (14) Northcity (11) Centrecity (7)

• Data included: interview transcripts, field notes, web pages

(social/ curriculum based), personal development plans,

students own work (group and individual), photos

• Rich, diverse, hybrid, across media, multimodal

Using Google Scholar

Because it searches within text so it searches for the words

throughout everything, whereas the library one only searches

on the title of the book or the title of the journal article so it’s

really useful because if you’re wanting an article that’s

about the political implications of phenomenology in a

specific country or something like that, the title might not say

that but it might talk about it in the actual book. If you can

type in like political implications phenomenology then it will

find someone talking about the political implications of… So

it’s found something about feminists worrying about the

political but it’s got phenomenology in it as well so you

know, where you’ve found things that is more relevant to

what you want to know about.

Using wikipedia • I quite often look up the meaning of words, like I use Wikipedia for just

random questions. Like this morning I wanted to know what ubiquitous meant, so I just used that and it wasn’t anything to do with college that was just me wanting to know. So I quite often use it for things like that. I use Wikipedia a lot to answer questions about stuff like what year something happened or, you know you hear people say things sometimes and you just like what does that actually mean.

• …you’re technically not suppose to be using Wikipedia for college stuff because anyone can put whatever they want on it, that’s the idea. You can’t reference it, that’s the thing but yes I have to look at things like, just general things and get the general gist.

• I would be paying more attention if it was for university as to where the information was coming from and trying to keep track of that rather than like for stuff that I would known just for myself I probably wouldn’t pay much attention to where it’s from

Implications

• Changing status of knowledge often institutionally driven

• Redefinition of literacy in the university

• Paying attention to integration of range of genres

• How can we find ways to harness these practices as

critical intellectual resource?

How have we assembled academic literacies?

• reliance on individual accounts of meaning making

• asking different kinds of questions – examples of

plagiarism, VLE, academics’ practices,

• individual practice and actor network


• knowledge always takes on and is embodied in a

material form. This material form is part of what Law

terms a ‘patterned network’, involving a process of

‘heterogeneous engineering in which bits and pieces of

the social, the technical, the conceptual and the textual

are fitted together p.2’ (Law 1992).

• Sociomaterial concerned with ‘tools, technologies,

bodies, actions.. objects’ (Fenwick 2010 )


ANT- what can it offer academic literacies

research?

• complementarity with literacies as social practice, helps

interrogate, rethink, refocus in a digital world

• move towards social and material account of literacies

• takes account of practices being enacted in emerging

and powerful networks

• potentially makes interplay between networks more

visible

• tension, pull and push between networks- university

reinventing itself The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology

Stabilizing the digital

• entities and reification v contested processes and

practices

• Google/Wikipedia/VLEs/Web 2.0/Facebook/ YouTube/

plagiarism (Turnitin & Copycatch)/ DL Framework


The case of plagiarism

• Mark: You’ve got to put through and Turnitin then, to make sure

you haven’t plagiarised. We’ve all got an account, and you just

sign on with your email, and then the password you use for all the

university computers, and then upload it onto there, then it checks

through like all the books, everyone else who has put in an essay,

it’s all stored on there so ... And then you print that off.

• Researcher: Do you do a paper print off as well?Mark: Yeah,

yeah. Well that’s just when you hand it in sort of thing, not before

you have to hand it in, no.Researcher: So you hand it in and

then?


• Mark: Well the plagiarism thing’s online, so you upload the file

from your computer and then, yeah, sort of check the percentage,

because it’s usually just the bibliography that is bringing up the

percentage.

• Researcher: So it means after it’s gone up you can actually take it

back and do something about it can you?

• Mark: Yeah, I mean if you plagiarise then you’ll want to change

something.

• Researcher: So it’s you who sees how much the percentage is, it

isn’t just the tutor.

• Mark: Yes, it is for the lecturers as well. Obviously if you’ve got a

50% plagiarism then there’s a problem.


• Don: What is the extent to which we’re allowed to

plagiarise, 17% or something?

• Mark: No, it’s just like 20%, but I mean that’s all with just

the bibliography or literally a couple of words which they

highlight and you just ignore that, but obviously if you’ve

got a paragraph then ...

• Don: And if you’re reproducing the title then ...

• Mark: Yeah, even the title sometimes, but it’s not a

problem.


The VLE • More than participant accounts

• What networks are involved?

• E.g. Administrative networks, library networks, learning

technology networks, academic networks

• Use of Powerpoint in lectures and uploaded to VLE; submission of

assignments


References • Goodfellow R & Lea M R eds. (2013) Literacy in the Digital University: critical

perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology SRHE/Routledge

• Hamilton M ( 2011) Unruly Practices: What a sociology of translations can offer to

educational policy analysis in Educational Philosophy and Theory 43 (No. S1), 2011

• Law J (2009) Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics in Bryan. S. Turner (ed) The

New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory Blackwell

• Lea M R (2013a) Reclaiming literacies: competing textual practices in a digital higher

education Teaching in Higher Education 18(1), pp. 106–118.

• Lea M R (2013b) Academic literacies in the digital university: integrating individual

accounts with network practice in Robin Goodfellow & Mary R Lea eds.(2013) Literacy

in the Digital University: critical perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology

SRHE/Routledge

• Lea M R. and Jones, S (2011) 'Digital literacies in higher education: exploring textual

and technological practice', Studies in Higher Education 36 (4) 377-395

• Lillis, T, Harrington, K, Lea, M R, Mitchell, S (forthcoming) Working with Academic

Literacies : Case Studies Towards Transformative Practice, WAC Clearinghouse,

Parlour Press


Documents

Researching academic and digital literacies in the ...€¦ · students in association with digital technologies •Theoretical and methodological framework from academic literacies