Selena Nemorin

Making the best of it? Exploring the realities of 3D printing in school

Abstract Digital fabrication and ‘3D Making’ are prominent recent additions to school curricula, hastened by the increased affordability of Computer Assisted Design software and devices such as 3D printers. It is increasingly argued that classroom use of these technologies can re-orientate schools towards forms of skills and knowledge appropriate for contemporary industry, STEM education and ‘Maker culture’. Amidst such rhetoric, questions are raised about how these technologies are being used in schools, and the extent to which this represents ‘new’ and/or ‘innovative’ forms of education. This paper presents an ethnographic investigation of a 3D printing course enacted in an Australian high school. These curricular activities are considered from three different perspectives: (i) the artefacts and devices involved in the project; (ii) the surrounding social and educational contexts; and (iii) the activities and practices implicit in the implementation of the project. These different levels of analysis highlight the complexities of technology-based schooling – not least the ways in which possible technical and/or pedagogical ‘innovations’ associated with 3D printing are shaped by the situational constraints of school contexts. The paper concludes by considering the likely future(s) of 3D printing and other forms of digital fabrication within the institutional confines of school.

Nagging, Noobs and New Tricks--Students' Perceptions of School as a Context for Digital Technology Use.

Abstract While digital technology is an integral feature of contemporary education, schools are often presumed to constrain and compromise students’ uses of technology. This paper investigates students’ experiences of school as a context for digital technology use. Drawing upon survey data from three Australian secondary schools (n = 1174), this paper considers the various ways in which students use digital devices and applications “in school” and “for school”. After highlighting trends and differences across a range of digital devices and practices, the paper explores the ways in which students perceive school as a limiting and/or enabling setting for technology use. The findings point to a number of ways that schools act to extend as well as curtail student engagement with technology. This paper concludes by considering the possible ways that schools might work to further support and/or enhance students’ technology experiences.

High-tech, hard work: an investigation of teachers’ work in the digital age

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ways in which digital technologies are now implicated in the work – and specifically the labour – of school teachers. Drawing upon qualitative studies in two Australian high schools, the paper examines the variety of ways in which teachers’ work is now enacted and experienced along digital lines. In particular, the paper highlights the association of digital technologies with the standardization, evidencing, intensification and altered affect of teachers’ work. The paper questions the extent to which these trends might be seen as constituting ‘new’ forms of labour, with the research data pointing to continuities and disjunctures in terms of teachers’ autonomy and professionalization. The paper also considers how these conditions are experienced in different ways across the teaching workforce. The paper concludes by reflecting on how fairer and/or empowering working conditions might be achievable through alternate uses of digital technology.

Left to their own devices: the everyday realities of one-to-one classrooms

Abstract The past decade has seen the expansion of personal digital technologies into schools. With many students and teachers now possessing smartphones, tablets, and laptops, schools are initiating one-to-one and ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) policies aiming to make use of these ‘personal devices’ in classrooms. While often discussed in terms of possible educational benefits and/or organisational risks, the actual presence of personal devices in schools tends to be more mundane in nature and effect. Drawing upon ethnographic studies of three Australian high schools, this paper details ways in which the proliferation of digital devices has come to bear upon everyday experiences of school. In particular, the paper highlights the ways in which staff and students negotiate (in)appropriate technology engagement; the ordinary (rather than extraordinary) ways that students make use of their devices in classrooms; and the device-related tensions now beginning to arise in schools. Rather than constituting a radically ‘transformational’ form of schooling, the paper considers how the heightened presence of personal technologies is becoming subsumed into existing micro-politics of school organisation and control.

Neuromarketing and the “poor in world” consumer: how the animalization of thinking underpins contemporary market research discourses

ABSTRACT Consumption research has been informed traditionally by cognitive psychology but it has now incorporated the diagnostic techniques of neuroscience to give rise to neuromarketing. Using bio-imaging technologies to track how consumers respond to advertising stimuli, neuromarketing aims to predict and manage consumer buying behaviour by decoding how instinctive drives can be triggered to enact buying habits. This paper examines the primary discursive reduction that occurs in the popular text/talk of neuromarketing: the reduction of the consumer to the state of a poor in world animal (animalization of thinking). Using a hybrid analytic of textual analysis and a Heideggerian philosophical frame, this work traces how discourses used to sell neuromarketing represent specific kinds of non-knowledgeable consumers. This hybrid approach offers consumption scholars a new perspective for understanding how animal representations of the consumer are deployed in neuromarketing as a discursive world.

Biosocial spaces and neurocomputational governance: brain-based and brain-targeted technologies in education

ABSTRACT Recently, technologies based on neuroscientific insights into brain function and structure have been promoted for application in education. The novel practices and environments produced by these technologies require new forms of ‘biosocial’ analysis to unpack their implications for education, learning and governance. This article provides an original analysis of current ‘brain-based’ R&D by the edu-business Pearson to apply artificial intelligence in education, and by the computing company IBM to develop cognitive systems for learning. These forms of neurocomputation are examined as technologies designed to function according to neuroscientific understandings of the brain, and to impress themselves on the cerebral lives of learners. The brain-based educational technologies proposed by Pearson and IBM are intended to optimize human cognition as a technique of human capital development in order to enhance the performance of education systems to secure a comparative advantage in a globalizing policy space, exemplifying new forms of neurocomputational governance and capital.