Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemBlending learning and technology: degree studies at vocational training college as a case in point( 2017)Blended learning is commonly defined as teaching and learning that combines digitally mediated and face-to-face activity. While the infusion and growth of digital technology into classrooms and beyond is said to have had the effect of transforming educational practices, educators talk of the unease that is experienced between what ‘should be’ and what ‘is’ when using educational technology in practice (Selwyn, 2014). There is a need for studies that challenge the qualities reified in discussions on educational technology such as ‘affordance’, ‘open’, or ‘ubiquitous’ and that articulate the lived reality of blended learning. Using actor-network theory, a materialist approach firmly based upon observation of actual events, this study explores blended learning as a sociomaterial practice in a higher education setting within an undergraduate business communications course. Departing from thinking about technology as a discrete artifact (Scott & Orlikowski, 2014), the study demonstrates the significance of material agency in the everyday practices of blended learning. Rather than a nexus of online and embodied activity, or a dualism of human/tool, the study extends the common understanding of blended learning by arguing that it does not exist outside of the relations that produce it. Viewed relationally, blended learning is an emergent practice, constituted by human-material co-agents (Michael, 2000). In the case under study, it presents as a heterogeneous assemblage of bytes, buildings, talk, smart ‘phones, learning systems and notes, among other materialities. Towards achieving a detailed tracing of the everyday practices of students when engaged in blended learning, the empirical material collected for the study involved learning management system log data, student discussion texts, classroom activity sketches, images of campus common areas and individual interviews. Technology was found to play a constitutive rather than a mediating role, producing blended learning as an effect. By using a concrete example of achieving the blend in blended learning, the chief contribution of this study lies in offering a more than constructivist approach that dismantles the notion of blended learning holding together as a discrete entity, realised through human agency alone. Practitioners of blended learning could, with profit, reflect on how spatial, digital and embodied learning encounters are performed through diverse sociomaterial practices. Further, blended learning designs that allow for the hybridity of practices will provide improved opportunities for students to learn in both embodied and digital encounters on-campus and online.