Literacy in the Digital University


Book Description

Literacy in the Digital University is an innovative volume bringing together perspectives from two fields of enquiry and practice: ‘literacies and learning’ and ‘learning technologies’. With their own histories and trajectories, these fields have seldom overlapped either in practice, theory, or research. In tackling this divide head on, the volume breaks new ground. It illustrates how complementary and contrasting approaches to literacy and technology can be brought together in productive ways and considers the implications of this for practitioners working across a wide range of contexts. The book showcases work from well-respected authorities in the two fields in order to provide the foundations for new conversations about learning and practice in the digital university. It will be of particular relevance to university teachers and researchers, educational developers and learning technologists, library staff, university managers and policy makers, and, not least, learners themselves, particularly those studying at post-graduate level.




The War on Learning


Book Description

An examination of technology-based education initiatives—from MOOCs to virtual worlds—that argues against treating education as a product rather than a process. Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each other, they are really both taking part in a war on learning itself. In this book, Elizabeth Losh examines current efforts to “reform” higher education by applying technological solutions to problems in teaching and learning. She finds that many of these initiatives fail because they treat education as a product rather than a process. Highly touted schemes—video games for the classroom, for example, or the distribution of iPads—let students down because they promote consumption rather than intellectual development. Losh analyzes recent trends in postsecondary education and the rhetoric around them, often drawing on first-person accounts. In an effort to identify educational technologies that might actually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), the gamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to “the Baked Professor”), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles of digital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will be essential reading for campus decision makers—and for anyone who cares about education and technology.




Conceptualising the Digital University


Book Description

Despite the increasing ubiquity of the term, the concept of the digital university remains diffuse and indeterminate. This book examines what the term 'digital university' should encapsulate and the resulting challenges, possibilities and implications that digital technology and practice brings to higher education. Critiquing the current state of definition of the digital university construct, the authors propose a more holistic, integrated account that acknowledges the inherent diffuseness of the concept. The authors also question the extent to which digital technologies and practices can allow us to re-think the location of universities and curricula; and how they can extend higher education as a public good within the current wider political context. Framed inside a critical pedagogy perspective, this volume debates the role of the university in fostering the learning environments, skills and capabilities needed for critical engagement, active open participation and reflection in the digital age. This pioneering volume will be of interest and value to students and scholars of digital education, as well as policy makers and practitioners.




The Digital University


Book Description

"In The Digital University, Michael Adrian Peters and Petar Jandric offer an insightful overview of the impacts of digital media in the work of the university, as well as a visionary manifesto articulating 'What is to be done.' This book is essential reading for any scholar concerned about the fate of academic life in these strangely dreadful yet nevertheless promising times."-William Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States




The Epistemology of Deceit in a Postdigital Era


Book Description

This edited book collection offers strong theoretical and philosophical insight into how digital platforms and their constituent algorithms interact with belief systems to achieve deception, and how related vices such as lies, bullshit, misinformation, disinformation, and ignorance contribute to deception. This inter-disciplinary collection explores how we can better understand and respond to these problematic practices. The Epistemology of Deceit in a Postdigital Era: Dupery by Design will be of interest to anyone concerned with deception in a ‘postdigital’ era including fake news, and propaganda online. The election of populist governments across the world has raised concerns that fake news in online platforms is undermining the legitimacy of the press, the democratic process, and the authority of sources such as science, the social sciences and qualified experts. The global reach of Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms has shown that they can be used to create and spread fake and misleading news quickly and without control. These platforms operate and thrive in an increasingly balkanised media eco-system where networks of users will predominantly access and consume information that conforms to their existing worldviews. Conflicting positions, even if relevant and authoritative, are suppressed, or overlooked in everyday digital information consumption. Digital platforms have contributed to the prolific spread of false information, enabled ignorance in online news consumers, and fostered confusion over determining fact from fiction. The collection explores: Deception, what it is, and how its proliferation is achieved in online platforms. Truth and the appearance of truth, and the role digital technologies play in pretending to represent truth. How we can counter these vices to protect ourselves and our institutions from their potentially baneful effects. Chapter 15 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.




Student Engagement in the Digital University


Book Description

Student Engagement in the Digital University challenges mainstream conceptions and assumptions about students’ engagement with digital resources in Higher Education. While engagement in online learning environments is often reduced to sets of transferable skills or typological categories, the authors propose that these experiences must be understood as embodied, socially situated, and taking place in complex networks of human and nonhuman actors. Using empirical data from a JISC-funded project on digital literacies, this book performs a sociomaterial analysis of student–technology interactions, complicating the optimistic and utopian narratives surrounding technology and education today and positing far-reaching implications for research, policy and practice.




Posthumanism and the Digital University


Book Description

It is a commonplace in educational policy and theory to claim that digital technology has 'transformed' the university, the nature of learning and even the essence of what it means to be a scholar or a student. However, these claims have not always been based on strong research evidence. What are students and scholars actually doing in the day-to-day life of the digital university? This book examines in detail how the world of the digital interacts with texts, artefacts, devices and humans, in the contemporary university setting. Weaving together perspectives from a range of thinkers and disciplinary sources, Lesley Gourlay draws on ideas from posthuman and new materialist theory in particular, to open up our understanding about how digital knowledge practices operate. She proposes that digital engagement in the university should not be regarded as 'virtual' or disembodied, but instead may be understood as a complex set of entanglements of the body, texts and material artefacts, making a case that agency and the ways in which knowledge emerges should be regarded as 'more than human'.




The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research


Book Description

The new edition of The SAGE Handbook of E-Learning Research retains the original effort of the first edition by focusing on research while capturing the leading edge of e-learning development and practice. Chapters focus on areas of development in e-learning technology, theory, practice, pedagogy and method of analysis. Covering the full extent of e-learning can be a challenge as developments and new features appear daily. The editors of this book meet this challenge by including contributions from leading researchers in areas that have gained a sufficient critical mass to provide reliable results and practices. The 25 chapters are organised into six key areas: 1. THEORY 2. LITERACY & LEARNING 3. METHODS & PERSPECTIVES 4. PEDAGOGY & PRACTICE 5. BEYOND THE CLASSROOM 6. FUTURES




Software Literacy


Book Description

This book explores the notion of software literacy, a key part of digital literacy which all contemporary students and citizens need to understand. Software literacy involves a critical understanding of how the affordances and conceptual approaches of everything from operating systems, creative apps and media editors, to software-based platforms and infrastructures work to inform and shape the ways we think and act. As a cultural artefact, programing code plays a role in reproducing, reinforcing, and augmenting existing cultural practices, as well as generating completely new coded practices. A proposed three-tier framework for software literacy is the focus for a two-year empirical investigation into how tertiary students become more literate about the nature and implications of software they encounter as part of their tertiary studies. Two case studies of software learning and use in university-level engineering and screen & media studies courses are presented, investigating the mapping of students’ trajectory of the learning of desktop applications against this framework for software literacy. Though the book’s focus is primarily educational, its content also has implications for any field that makes use of software and information & communication technology systems and applications. As such, the book will be of interest to all readers whose work involves the challenges and opportunities presented by software-based teaching and learning; and to those interested in how software impacts the workplace and leisure activities that make up our day-to-day lives.




Literacy Practices and Perceptions of Agency


Book Description

In this book, Bronwyn T. Williams explores how perceptions of agency—whether a person perceives and feels able to read and write successfully in a given context—are critical in terms of how people perform their literate identities. Drawing on interviews and observations with students in several countries, he examines the intersections of the social and the personal in relation to how and, crucially, why people engage successfully or struggle painfully in literacy practices and what factors and forces they regard as enabling or constraining their actions. Recognizing such moments and patterns can help teachers and researchers rethink their approaches to teaching to facilitate students’ sense of agency as writers and readers.