Terrie Lynn Thompson

Grounding theories of W(e)Learn: a framework for online interprofessional education.

Interprofessional care (IPC) is a prerequisite for enhanced communication between healthcare team members, improved quality of care, and better outcomes for patients. A move to an IPC model requires changing the learning experiences of healthcare providers during and after their qualification program. With the rapid growth of online and blended approaches to learning, an educational framework that explains how to construct quality learning events to provide IPC is pressing. Such a framework would offer a quality standard to help educators design, develop, deliver, and evaluate online interprofessional education (IPE) programs. IPE is an extremely delicate process due to issues related to knowledge, status, power, accountability, personality traits, and culture that surround IPC. In this paper, a review of the pertinent literature that would inform the development of such a framework is presented. The review covers IPC, IPE, learning theories, and eLearning in healthcare.

Interviewing objects: including educational technologies as qualitative research participants

This article argues the importance of including significant technologies‐in‐use as key qualitative research participants when studying today’s digitally enhanced learning environments. We gather a set of eight heuristics to assist qualitative researchers in ‘interviewing’ technologies‐in‐use (or other relevant objects), drawing on concrete examples from our own qualitative research projects. Our discussion is informed by Actor‐Network Theory and hermeneutic phenomenology, as well as by the literatures of techno‐science, media ecology, and the philosophy of technology.

W(e)Learn: A framework for online interprofessional education

A framework is required to guide online Interprofessional Education (IPE) (Casimiro et al., 2009). The purpose of this paper is to present such a framework: W(e)Learn. W(e)Learn can be used as a quality standard and a guide to design, develop, deliver and evaluate online IPE in both pre- and post-qualification educational settings. The framework is presented in the spirit that educational programs have defining features that, when carefully designed with the appropriate blend of factors, can help achieve desired outcomes. W(e)Learn must now be applied in various contexts to assess its constructs and its applicability.

Work‐learning in informal online communities: evolving spaces

– This paper seeks to explore how workers engage in informal online communities for work‐learning. Although online communities may facilitate learning and knowledge creation, much of the literature is situated in formal online courses, suggesting a need to better understand the nuances of more informal learning spaces online., – Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 11 own‐account self‐employed workers (contractors and consultants who do not have staff)., – Participants engaged in ways that fit with expectations, leveraged fluidity, played with boundaries, and meshed with work. These workers attempted to (re)configure online spaces to create the degree of connection and learning needed, although not always successfully. This study explores how participants participated in much less pedagogically inscribed spaces and foregrounds several issues related to online engagement: managing exposure, force‐feeding community, and navigating multi‐purpose spaces., – There are indications that these workers are moving toward more networked architectures of online participation. How the notion of online community continues to evolve warrants further research., – Although turning to an online community is sometimes the only viable learning option, online presence brings challenges to be addressed by practitioners and policy makers, including attending to the nature of relationships in and between different cyberspaces, information and media literacies required, and the implications of such extensive connectivity between people and their web‐technologies., – By exploring how adults reach out to others in “informal” online communities for learning purposes, this paper encourages researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and citizens to consider tensions and questions associated with cyberspace collectives.

I’m deleting as fast as I can: negotiating learning practices in cyberspace

Learning in and through work is one of the many spaces in which pedagogy may unfold. Web technologies amplify this fluidity and online learning now encompasses a plethora of practices. In this paper I focus on the delete button and deleting practices of self-employed workers engaged in informal work-related learning in online communities. How the relational and material aspects of online pedagogical practices are being negotiated is explored. While deleting appears to be an everyday practice, understanding the delete button as a fluid object in fluid space begins to illuminate its complexity and multiple enactments. Deleting practices which work to stem the tide of information pushing itself on to screens, as well as those practices that attempt to delete traces left behind on screens and ‘in the cloud’, are examined. Actor-network theory provides the theoretical and conceptual tools for this exploration. I conclude with observations on the politics of the delete button and implications for more sophistic...Learning in and through work is one of the many spaces in which pedagogy may unfold. Web technologies amplify this fluidity and online learning now encompasses a plethora of practices. In this paper I focus on the delete button and deleting practices of self-employed workers engaged in informal work-related learning in online communities. How the relational and material aspects of online pedagogical practices are being negotiated is explored. While deleting appears to be an everyday practice, understanding the delete button as a fluid object in fluid space begins to illuminate its complexity and multiple enactments. Deleting practices which work to stem the tide of information pushing itself on to screens, as well as those practices that attempt to delete traces left behind on screens and ‘in the cloud’, are examined. Actor-network theory provides the theoretical and conceptual tools for this exploration. I conclude with observations on the politics of the delete button and implications for more sophisticated digital fluency in everyday pedagogy.

(Re/dis)assembling learning practices online with fluid objects and spaces

Actor network theory (ANT) is used to explore how work-learning is enacted in informal online communities and illustrates how researchers might use sociomaterial approaches to uncover complexities, uncertainties, and specificities of work-learning practices. Participants in this study were self-employed workers. The relational and material aspects of work-learning, along with notions of the workspace of the self-employed as hybrid, distributed, and shifting, are considered. This study then examines the work that web-technologies, such as postings, do as they are entangled in an array of networks. Far from being singular objects unified in function, form, or effect, the posting provides multiple entry points for exploring online work-learning practices. The informal learning enacted in this study was the effect of multiple networks and attempts to stabilize fluidity. Different associations with knowledge and novel ways of knowing were also enacted, although there are contradictions between Web2.0 rhetoric and the practices of these self-employed workers. Findings suggest that practitioners and researchers should not be too quick to paint work-learning practices in online communities, or even the notion of online community, with a broad brush.

Learning analytics: challenges and limitations

ABSTRACT Learning analytic implementations are increasingly being included in learning management systems in higher education. We lay out some concerns with the way learning analytics – both data and algorithms – are often presented within an unproblematized Big Data discourse. We describe some potential problems with the often implicit assumptions about learning and learners – and indeed the tendency not to theorize learning explicitly – that underpin such implementations. Finally, we describe an attempt to devise our own analytics, grounded in a sociomaterial conception of learning. We use the data obtained to suggest that the relationships between learning and the digital traces left by participants in online learning are far from trivial, and that any analytics that relies on these as proxies for learning tends towards a behaviorist evaluation of learning processes.

Who’s Taming Who? Tensions Between People and Technologies in Cyberspace Communities

It would seem that for many people, spaces on the Web have become an integral part of their lives. This may include seeking out learning opportunities in online communities. But how do people negotiate the materiality of screens and settings; discussion boards, RSS feeds and avatars; passwords and Facebook profiles? Emphasizing the relational aspects of learning, networked learning focuses on connections among learners, other people, learning resources and technologies. Although human–human relations are not necessarily privileged, appropriate conceptual tools are required to explore other types of relations, particularly human–non-human associations. Actor Network Theory (ANT) is one perspective that enables a socio-material exploration of heterogeneous networks. This chapter draws on ANT to explore how the interactions between Web technologies and self-employed workers shape work-related learning practices in an online community. The chapter examines the co-constitutive relationship between human and non-human actants. Findings suggest that participating “in” an online community is a series of passages marked by both attempts to stabilize and disrupt relations. As participants in this study attempted to “tame” the technology, the technologies in use were doing their part to tame other actants. However, these relationships do not describe distinct human and non-human entities, but rather hybrids or socio-technical constructions – a blending. The chapter concludes with questions emerging from such provocative entanglements.

Self-employed and online: (Re)negotiating work-learning practices

Purpose – In order to explore how informal pedagogical moments are being renegotiated by the technology woven into peoples lives, this paper aims to focus on online communities as sites of learning; more specifically, the informal work‐related learning practices of self‐employed workers in these cyberspaces.Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws on the notion of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) from situated learning theory in order to examine the development of work‐learning practices online. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with own‐account self‐employed workers (contractors and consultants who do not have staff) about their engagement in online communities for work learning.Findings – Findings indicate that these self‐employed workers were learning work practices, the viability of doing particular work, how to participate in online communities for work learning, and how to participate in fluid knowledges. The significance of developing a work‐learning practice is emphasized, ...

Digital doings: curating work–learning practices and ecologies

Workers are faced with wider networks of knowledge generation amplified by the scale, diffusion, and critical mass of digital artefacts and web technologies globally. In this study of mobilities of work–learning practices, I draw on sociomaterial theorizing to explore how the work and everyday learning practices of self-employed workers or micro-small business entrepreneurs are changing through the infusion of web and mobile technologies. Drawing primarily on Ingolds notion of wayfinding, Laws collateral realities, and Knorr-Cetinas work on epistemic objects, I examine data from 23 contingent workers in Rwanda, Kenya, and Canada to explore emergent practices of curating learning ecologies (mixtures of technologies, artefacts, activities, and people). I conclude with implications for educators and workers of the growing sophistication of digital fluencies that matter: the play of innovation, expertise, and criticality in everyday work–learning practices and a more thoughtful reckoning with the implications of human–technology interactions on practices.