RMeS PhD Masterclass: Researching Platform Pedagogies
Professor Julian Sefton-Green (Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia)
Date: 13 December 2023
Time: Workshop 10.00 – 12.00 | Lecture 12.00 – 13.30
Venue: University of Groningen – Collaboratories, Faculty of Arts, Oude Kijk in ‘t Jatstraat 26
Credits: 1 EC
For: PhD Candidates and RMa students in Media Studies, who are members of a Dutch Graduate Research School
Register for the workshop VIA THIS LINK.
After the workshop, Julian Sefton-Green will give a public lecture which workshop participants also attend.
Lunch lecture: The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age
This presentation reflects on a year–long ethnography into the ‘learning lives’ of 13-14 year olds in London published as The Class: Living and learning in the Digital Age by Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green (New York University Press 2016). In that book we focused on the everyday and routine uses of media in the home and in this talk I will describe how learning is constructed, mediated and enacted by showing how different families adopt and use folk ‘theories of learning’; and how such theories related to dominant discourses around learning in school. I examine how domestic media technologies contribute to dominant conceptualizations of education.
I this talk, I will reflect on how our approach to media, the home and learning contributed to an investigation of significant social changes prior to current concerns with datafication and platformization and argue that our interest in young peoples agency and every day media use continues to offer important research perspectives contributing to changing public debate.
RMeS PhD Masterclass: Researching Platform Pedagogies
In recent years, the concept of a platform has gained traction as a way of explaining new kinds of economic, social and civic structure. Originally used to describe a specific interface or website, the idea of a platform has come to stand for the ways that digital services and online participation operate through an integrated array of back-end services and analytics as well as a series of user-facing affordances and interactions across devices/screens that are platform agnostic. The platform thus brings together how an individual at a micro level might, for example, make a purchase, communicate with others, post an opinion, utilise a service and so on, with the socio-technical infrastructure which allows the state and commercial entities that run such platforms to monitor (surveil), harvest, and monetise the aggregated value of such data-driven interactions. Devices and technologies are now uncoupled from proprietary platforms allowing for the platform itself to derive power and authority across a series of markets.
This PhD masterclass will explore what it means to conceive:
- of the relationship between people and their platforms as a pedagogic relationship,
- and how such conceptualisations might advance study of platforms in general.
And, additionally, using the term pedagogy in its more specifically educational sense:
- to explore the relationship between learning, schooling and education systems as they are now moving into and across emerging platforms,
- thus, advancing scholarship about the uses of platforms in Education.
The masterclass will discuss and reflect on:
- What kind of conceptual framing is most useful to make sense of “a platform”?
Interface studies, software studies, platform studies, political economy, design and user experience are all distinct academic traditions that lay claim to explaining platforms as a new “field”. - Do platforms have a pedagogy? or What is the pedagogic relationship between people (often constructed as users or clients or citizens) and specific platforms?
In what ways do platforms frame and offer ways of being and behaving that amounts to a form of teaching for users/participants? How are behavioural norms enacted and regulated and how do new and experienced users learn what kinds of participation and performance gain approval/disapproval? How do people take experiences from one platform to construct “progressions” when they move to others and how do forms of expertise and experience get valued and rewarded? - Do the new platforms now present in schools change the practices of education and the relationship between social actors in the school system?
Platforms in a relatively closed institution like the school system have the capacity to knit together new circuits of communication, knowledge-sharing, surveillance and care. At the same time, data from these new relationships are now available to actors outside the education system creating questions about privacy and rights. Platforms bring together parents, teachers, students and administrators in a new kind of pedagogic relationship. - What is the pedagogy of educational platforms?
Many open education and online learning platforms especially those expanding at scale and speed in higher education offer particular kinds of pedagogic framing. Yet, both learners and teachers on these platforms might bring with them experiences of, and interest in, other kinds of alternative teaching and learning relationships, especially where those are derived from progressive traditions including forms of relational pedagogy, work-shopping and/or drama in education/learning in role practices. How can such practices be incorporated, and re-made across the new platforms?
Readings
Kumar, Priya C., Jessica Vitak, Marshini Chetty, and Tamara L. Clegg. 2019. The Platformization of the Classroom: Teachers as Surveillant Consumers. Surveillance & Society 17(1/2): 145-152.
https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com
Kelkar, S. (2018). Engineering a platform: The construction of interfaces, users, organizational roles, and the division of labor. New Media & Society, 20(7), 2629–2646. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817728682
Sefton-Green, J. (2021). Towards platform pedagogies: why thinking about digital platforms as pedagogic devices might be useful. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2021.1919999
Julian Sefton-Green is Professor of New Media Education at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has worked as an independent scholar and has held positions at the Department of Media & Communication, London School of Economics & Political Science (where he is currently a visiting professor) and at the University of Oslo working on projects exploring learning and learner identity across formal and informal domains. He has been an Honorary Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK and the Institute of Education, Hong Kong, and a Visiting Professor at The Playful Learning Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland.
He has been the Head of Media Arts and Education at WAC Performing Arts and Media College – a centre for informal training and education – where he directed a range of digital media activities for young people and co-ordinated training for media artists and teachers. Prior to that he worked as Media Studies teacher in an inner-city comprehensive London; and in higher education teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses, leading teacher training degrees in media education.
He has researched and written widely on many aspects of media education, new technologies, creativity, digital cultures and informal learning and has authored, co-authored or edited 20 books. Recent volumes include The Class: living and learning in the digital age (New York University Press, 2016), Learning beyond the School: international perspectives on the schooled society (Routledge, 2018), Learning to Live with Datafication educational case studies from around the world (Routledge 2022) and Youthsites: histories of creativity, care and learning in the city (Oxford, 2023). He has directed research projects for the Arts Council of England, the British Film Institute, Creative Partnerships and Nominet Trust, and was one of core members of the MacArthur Funded, Connected Learning Research Network. He is currently a key lead researcher in the Australian Research Council funded Centre of Excellence studying Digital Childhoods and co-director of a 3 year study, funded by The Wallace Foundation, Tracing the Enduring effects of Community Arts participation. He has spoken at over 50 conferences in around 20 different countries <www.julianseftongreen.net>
