ERIC Number: EJ1256707
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2020
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1743-9884
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Investigating Digital Doings through Breakdowns: A Sociomaterial Ethnography of a Bring Your Own Device School
Learning, Media and Technology, v45 n2 p193-207 2020
As personal digital devices have become increasingly embedded in schools, what they do tends to silently fall into the background and generally be taken for granted. In order to scrutinize the silent doings of digital devices, this paper explores how attending to breakdowns as a methodological heuristic device can be an insightful entry point to surface and analyze these doings. By conducting a sociomaterial ethnographic study in one Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) school, this paper disentangles four different breakdowns that occurred during the ethnographic study. The analysis reveals a particular mode of digital doings at school, coined as digital pedagogics, that characterizes the school space-time as plastic and poly-synchronous and curates lesson activities. Moreover, this mode is heavily conditioned by and through the school's sociomaterial infrastructure. The paper concludes that in the wake of the breakdowns, the school's infrastructure comes into being not merely as a bundle of cables and basic structures that make the school function, but more importantly as a complex configuration of clouds, software and interfaces, algorithms and patterns, standards, protocols and negotiations. This sets the condition for framing contemporary digitized schools within a particular techno-scholastic milieu.
Descriptors: Educational Technology, Technology Uses in Education, Ownership, Handheld Devices, Laptop Computers, Social Influences, Safety, Telecommunications, Networks, Classroom Environment, Instructional Materials, Learning Activities, Teaching Methods
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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