Researching with Heart in Ed-Tech: What Opportunities Does the Socially Indeterminate Character of Technological Artifacts Open up for Affirming Emergent and Marginalized Practices?

Abstract

In this chapter I draw upon theoretical concepts broadly consistent with a sociocultural view of technology to discuss a series of observations about emergent digital practices and school learning, and to raise implications for ed-tech research. Specifically, I seek to claim some space for—and to argue the merit of—“close-up” studies of the actual (Selwyn, 2010): studies that seek to document the diversity of doings that comprise technology use by young people in and out of school. Three main arguments are made:

• 1. Conceptualizing technology as indeterminate provides more sophisticated and more generative lenses for seeing new technologies and emergent practices than do more naturalized understandings of technologies as already-completed-things that can be known independent of the context of use.

• 2. Stories play an important role in what meaning we make from the use of technological artifacts in educational settings, serving as agents in what we authorize as valuable and what we see as possible. This is as true for the stories produced by researchers as it is for stories told by those teachers, parents, and students who participate in our research.

• 3. “Close-up” studies (Trowler, 2012) of marginalized practices can provide alternative accounts to those that take an authorized center as their starting point, thus affirming emergent practices and troubling tacit assumptions about schooling and the roles of educational research.