The focus on living with technologies asks vital questions about e-, m- and u-learning, of course. It asks that we attend to both the already-stable and the still-emerging use genres into which learning is being shepherded. It asks that we do not assume a seamless transplant: just because a device has learning affordances does not mean that learning can (or should) be made part of the repertoires of its use. A recurring theme in the empirical studies in this book concerns those devices that are and aren’t used to access podcasts, and the times and places when podcasts are used by learners. Why is it that so many learners reported using their personal computer to access podcasts? Why did their learning take place when and where it did, and why didn’t it take place at other times and spaces – including those predicted to be ‘fillable’ with learning activity?
These questions require a many-headed approach. We need to understand, as Moisander and Eriksson (2006) showed above, how devices do come configured with uses (and users) in mind. But we also need to attend to the experiences of use, to those slowly emerging cultures of use that Lehtonen brought to our attention. The potential uses of digital devices are multiplying, to the extent that we don’t quite know what to call them anymore. When does a mobile phone become something else, when does its ‘phoneness’ recede as it becomes also a camera, an internet connection, a television, a GPS device, a games console, and so on? How do users develop use genres, some collective and some individual, some preset and some surprising?
To understand the relation between the affordances of technologies and the dispositions of users, we need to explore the discursive construction of particular technologies, and connect this to stories of experience, of use, of cohabitation. By this I mean we need to get a handle on the ways that devices are talked about, written about, thought about: how do certain discourses take hold, and help to shape technologies and uses? Selwyn (2002) offers an insightful discussion of the discursive construction of the personal computer as an educational device in the UK in the 1980s useful to us here. He shows, through a detailed reading of government policy and IT business strategy, how the idea of ‘educational computing’ was discursively constructed and perpetuated, becoming unquestioned common sense. While personal computers have arguably lost some of this primary attachment to learning, Selwyn shows how this particular history has shaped and continues to shape understandings and uses of computers. Learning has been naturalized as something that computers mediate. We could track parallel tales of the configuring of other technologies; this would certainly help us understand why learning ‘sticks’ to some devices better than others. That the personal computer has this history of educational configuring has doubtless contributed to the use genres reported in the case studies here: it is a ‘proper’ learning technology, therefore appropriate for educational podcast consumption. It appears, on the evidence laid out in this book, to be more amenable to ‘podagogy’ than other digital devices – even if the primary purpose of those devices is more closely bound up with podcasting. |
