Victor Lally

The crisis and the response: after the dust had settled

ABSTRACT The focus for the group was clear – it was global. Space, time, resources and chance have, however, limited the topics and the treatments they received, and so in this paper we ask: what slipped through the net, what fell between the cracks, and what alternatives were there? We also look at some topics that received only oblique or partial attention, and some that received none at all. These include the separation of online educators’ personal, professional and political ethics; alternative responses from outside the discourses of the North and West; the threat to marginal communities and indigenous cultures from the success of learning with mobiles; the particular role of mobiles within the industrialisation of higher education, and the notion of crisis itself.

The realities of researching alongside virtual youth in late modernity: creative practices and activity theory

Young peoples use and understanding of the Internet is still under-researched. We argue that researching alongside young people in technological settings (a virtual world on the Internet in this paper) is a complicated nexus of conceptual, methodological and theoretical challenges. We argue that these are in dialectical, and sometimes incoherent, relationships with the realities of research processes and young peoples lived experiences with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The Economic and Social Research Council/Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESRC/EPSRC)-funded Inter-Life Project developed a ‘Virtual Research Community’ in Second Life™ to investigate how young people can work creatively to develop their own agency and subjectivities. We reflect on these challenges as they articulated with the ‘Inter-Life’ Projects aims. They include the need for more empirical evidence of the realities of young peoples lives with ICTs, and for re-theorisation of their subjectivities in ICT settings. We interrogate the challenges of participatory research in such settings and the role of creative practices and virtual spaces in finding a voice and being a participatory researcher. In the second part, we illustrate the realities of researching in a virtual world through the lived experience of young people who worked with us. We also explore how activity theory (AT) might assist in the methodological and analytical work of researching young peoples creativity in a virtual world.

Researching Transitions in Learning and Education: international perspectives on complex challenges and imaginative solutions

The purpose of this special issue is to stimulate a new conversation using radical international perspectives on transitions in learning – formal and informal – experienced by young people, and reported in this eclectic collection of articles. One of the key challenges is to understand how we might re-theorise transition using these international perspectives as critical tools. In the UK, it has been argued, the traditional structures of transition have become obscured within a ‘marketised education’ offering the ‘illusion’ of individual choice. For example, Biesta (2006) wrote that a ‘predicament’ could arise from the concept of lifelong learning where participants can feel a lack of empowerment to create their own learning ‘agenda’ amid conflicting life and social demands. These factors can result in a paradoxical process: the increasing of ‘individualisation’ in the public sphere, and simultaneously increased reliance upon family resources in the private sphere. In a parallel vein, Cote and Levine (2002, cited in Schwartz et al, 2005) observe: