Society and Information Research Group

Along with Linda Creanor of Glasgow Caledonian, I organised a symposium ‘Exploring sociotechnical theories of learning technology’  at Networked Learning 2010 in Aalborg. The symposium also included papers by SIRG colleague Chris Bissell, Karen Kear (of the department’s Technology and Education Research Group) and Frances Bell from the Salford Business School. The papers (available at the above link) variously explored the application of social shaping, sociotechnical networks, actor networks and social presence to understanding learning technologies.

Chris presenting at Aalborg symposium

The session was very well attended. The paper presentations were followed by a lively discussion.  There is a growing concern in learning technology research community about the theoretical underpinnings of research in to networked learning and learning technologies more generally (see Grainne Conole hot seat discussion paper and the plenary ‘fishbowl’ conversation between Etienne Wenger and Yrjo Engestrom videos on the conference website). In part, this stems from dissatisfaction with determinist approaches to understanding technologies. The symposium made a contribution to these debates by presenting perspectives deriving primarily from information systems and/or technology studies. This may be a particular contribution that, with colleagues from TERG, we can make a distinctive contribution to these debates based on perspectives developed in our own disciplines.

View from the chair (photo: Frances Bell)

Personally, the symposium highlighted issues of process which are becoming commonplace in events like this. Part way through chairing the discussion, it dawned on me that the event was being blogged/tweeted by participants in real time, and that I had no idea what was being said. This was a first for me. Happily, when I checked afterwards, these digital comments seemed to support my own interpretation. These are still available – the twitter hashtag for the conference (including for our session) has been archived here. The session was live blogged (and commented) in cloudworks. There are even some photos, taken by Frances Bell.

Steve

As some will recall, Magnus, David Chapman and I presented a session at cyber2008 in Stockholm about eighteen months ago. Magnus was first off the mark with a journal paper as a result: Norbert and Gregory: Two strands of cybernetics. Information, Communication and Society, 12(5), pp. 735–749. A report of my paper has just appeared as ‘Not just Norbert’ in the journal Kybernetes. Quite easy to find further information via Google (not too many combinations of kybernetes + Bissell … although more than you might expect for my first publication there).

I’ve given a couple of conference papers recently. The first was in Helsinki … a very small-scale event made even smaller by the volcanic ash that prevented a number of people attending, including the keynote speaker Andrew Pickering. He had been going to speak on the history of British cybernetics, and my paper was on early German cybernetics, so I’d hoped for an interesting debate.  Here’s the abstract of my paper … a full article is due out in Information, Communication and Society later in the year.

Hermann Schmidt and German ‘proto-cybernetics’

Histories of cybernetics, at least those in the English language, concentrate almost exclusively on its origins in the USA and UK, associated primarily with Norbert Wiener and colleagues, and in particular with the series of Macy conferences from 1946 onwards. Independent work was, however, carried out elsewhere. In Germany, Hermann Schmidt introduced the notion of Allgemeine Regelungskunde [general control theory] in the early 1940s, which bore many similarities to the almost exactly contemporary work of Wiener and colleagues. Schmidt’s work was subsequently largely neglected during the rapid post-war dissemination of cybernetics ideas until it was, to a certain extent, rediscovered in Germany in the 1960s. There Schmidt is often credited, alongside Wiener, as one of the two ‘fathers’ of cybernetics. This paper presents the nature and background of Schmidt’s contributions and assesses their significance.

The second conference was a far larger affair:  Networked Learning Conference 2010, in Aalborg, Denmark. I was part of a session entitled Exploring sociotechnical theories of learning technology. This was jointly organised by Steve Walker and Linda Creanor, and another OU colleague, Karen Kear, also gave a paper. Here’s the abstract of my contribution … the full proceedings should be available on-line via the conference website fairly soon.

The social construction of educational technology through the use of proprietary software

Major strands of science and technology studies (STS) in recent decades have been the ‘social shaping of technology’ (SST) and ‘social construction of technology’ (SCOT) movements, whose adherents maintain that technological systems are determined just as much by social forces as by technological ones. Taking this ‘co-construction’ notion as a starting point, and putting a focus on the user, I look at some examples of the use of proprietary software in which the learner, instead of being constrained by a rather deterministic pedagogy of educational technology, can exploit the functionality of the software in ways far removed from the original design. For example, spreadsheets can be used to incorporate modelling assumptions directly to simulate digital signal transmission, or the workings of the binomial function. Audio editing software can be used to teach about the technology of music by allowing the student to explore waveform characteristics. The manipulation of images, if combined with a teaching of the principles behind data compression, can engender a deep understanding of the processes involved. And translation software can be used for language learning in a way very different from what was envisaged by the designers. Educational technology has tended to suffer from an emphasis on, and excessive claims for, technological innovation and novelty. Film, radio, television, programmed learning, interactive video discs, CD-ROMs, a ‘computer in every classroom’, ‘one laptop per child’, the web, computer-mediated communication, smartboards; and now mashups, Second Life, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – all have all been seen as radical new technologies that would revolutionize learning. Here I make the case for the social construction of educational technology by users and teachers, based on exploiting to far better effect the possibilities of mature, often proprietary, software not originally designed for pedagogical purposes. The approach outlined here not only helps students gain experience with the sort of software they are likely to encounter in their professional life, but also fosters and sustains a healthy spirit of enquiry that too often is lacking in much educational software. Although the examples presented have been situated in the context of the individual learner, similar principles can be applied to a whole range of networked educational technologies.