Från mina "future interests"

Vi som är med i LinCS har ombetts att beskriva våra framtida forskningsteman. Tänkte bjuda på några av mina:

Students' use of their own technologies:

In the iStown-project we study how students themselves come to “digitize” the educational settings, and activities. Our studies indicate that the ways in which these technologies are used, valued, understood and learned is different than IT introduced by educators/teachers. This also calls for an alternative methodological perspective, studying the students’ use of IT from a student perspective, e.g. focusing on how students engage in their everyday educational activities using IT, doing micro-studies of students technology use in educational settings.

IT to describe competence

In the Comanwo project we looked at how IT is used to describe and value knowledge in organizations. In past projects with industry we looked at how “competence management systems” are used to capture the competence of the workers. To be able to put such a system to work required skilled work of the persons working with these systems. This also relates to educational practices where similar systems are increasingly used, and with that similar pedagogical ideas being inscribed and incorporated with those systems.

How we understand mobile technology

Some years ago two master students and I collected data on how people deal with battery power on their mobile phones (thanks Nokia). These studies showed how people formed different understandings and that these affected how they would use, share, buy, charge their phones. It also showed a distance between how the technology actually worked and how people understood it. I would like to look further into how people understand their IT, what they use to form ways of understanding, and how this affects the use.

Instruction through and with online material

In the iDeas project we looked at the use of WIKIs to support text supervision with students some years ago. The material still have unexplored aspects, such as video recordings of how students deal with teachers comments.

Memory of use

As we use our digital devices they collect use histories (as with the web-browser, opened files, etc). Tomas and I are currently working on a paper investigating how use situations are connected through these breadcrumbs of interaction.