Sian Bayne

What's the matter with ‘technology-enhanced learning’?

In recent years, ‘technology-enhanced learning’, or ‘TEL’, has become a widely accepted term in the UK and Europe for describing the interface between digital technology and higher education teaching, to a large extent taking the place of other recently popular terminologies such as ‘e-learning’, ‘learning technology’ and ‘computer-based learning’. Yet there has been little critique in the literature of the assumptions embedded within the terminology of TEL: rather it has been adopted as an apparently useful, inoffensive and descriptive shorthand for what is in fact a complex and often problematic constellation of social, technological and educational change. This paper subjects the term to a deeper analysis, drawing on insights from critical posthumanism, science and technology studies and Biestas critique of the ‘learnification’ of education. In particular, it foregrounds the instrumentalisation of technology enacted by TEL, explores some of the problematic links between TEL and the philosophy of transhumanism, and critiques TEL for failing properly to interrogate its own ontological biases. The paper suggests that we need to be more careful with, and more critical of, the terminology we adopt to describe and determine the field.

Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching

Promises of ‘teacher-light’ tuition and of enhanced ‘efficiency’ via the automation of teaching have been with us since the early days of digital education, sometimes embraced by academics and institutions, and sometimes resisted as a set of moves which are damaging to teacher professionalism and to the humanistic values of education itself. However, both the embrace and the resistance can be seen to be anchored in a humanistic orientation to the project of education which recent work in the theory of critical posthumanism draws into question. Working within the broad frame of critical posthumanism, this paper will revisit the notion of teacher automation in higher education, exploring how as teachers we might enact new, resistant ways of playing at the boundaries of the human and machine.

Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies

This paper explores the possibility of an uncanny digital pedagogy. Drawing on theories of the uncanny from psychoanalysis, cultural studies and educational philosopy, it considers how being online defamiliarises teaching, asking us to question and consider anew established academic practices and conventions. It touches on recent thinking on higher education as troublesome, anxiety‐inducing and ‘strange’, viewing online learning and teaching practices through the lens of an uncanny which is productively disruptive in its challenging of the ‘certainties’ of place, body and text. Uncanny pedagogies are seen as a generative way of working with the new ontologies of the digital.

Socially reconstructing history: the Social History Timestream application

For centuries, print media controlled by powerful gatekeepers have played a dominant part in the recording and construction of history. Digital media open up new opportunities for the social construction of historical narratives that reveal personal and situated viewpoints. In January 2012, work began at the University of Edinburgh on the design, development and distribution of a web-based Social History Timestream application for social history research projects across a range of disciplines. The application enables researchers to establish dynamically generated timelines (divided into days, months, years, decades, etc.), to which researchers and members of the public can post photographs, textual descriptions and other media. With the addition of meta-data such as tags and locations, the resulting timelines provide a way to compare thematically related events across time. A primary aim of the application is to provide opportunities for researchers to discover serendipitous time-based connections between topics and events that might not previously have been considered. Key to the projects success will be an engaging interface that allows visitors to see public imagery (e.g. items from the news) alongside personal imagery (e.g. what a given person was doing on that day), organized by themes (e.g. geography, health, politics or media). Among other things, the interface will allow comparison of mainstream versions of particular themed histories with the personal accounts of those who experienced them, or to visualize the development of ideas, technologies and social categorizations over time. At the time of writing, the Timestream application is still in development and is being piloted with three research projects. This paper will focus on one of these – a History of Photography Practices – to describe emerging theoretical and methodological design considerations, demonstrate the interface and offer insights into the process of using the Timestream application.