This chapter investigates the discursive dimension of digital learning environments with a focus on emergent digital language practices and new text architectures. Thus, in order to reflect and characterize these digital language practices afforded by e-learning environments, the authors ground their reflections on the theoretical framework proposed by Paveau to define and analyze technodiscursive practices. How do the platform's algorithmic patterns and affordances shape the way meaning is made in digital texts and online technolanguage activities? Guided by this key question, this chapter will characterize and analyze one e-learning environment—CGScholar—based on the platform's technodiscursive practices. Through a qualitative methodological approach, the author investigates and illustrates how digital learning ecologies designs/programs support the nature and complexity of technolanguage activities, based on Paveau's work on technodiscourse.
TopIntroduction
This chapter aims to look into the technodiscursive possibilities afforded by digital learning environments and learning management systems, focusing on the compositional elements of the new textual architectures that characterize the teaching-learning online discourse practices in these digital ecologies.
Today’s “new landscape of communication” (Kress, 2000) and the great impact technology has had on our everyday lives have resulted in significant changes on how we interact, learn, teach, communicate, and, therefore, also on how we organize our textual practices (Barton & Lee, 2013). In this new scenario, highly mediated by digital technology, software (Manovich, 2013), and the web, we can point out at least two primary shifts. Firstly, we can mention the transformation of our language practices – which increasingly rely on the combination of multisemiotic elements supported by technology. Secondly, we have witnessed an epistemological shift and the emergence of new spaces for learning, along with the understanding of the knowledge-making process as an unstable, dialogic, collaborative, collective process.
Considering these new e-learning ecologies, Cope and Kalantzis (2017) explore “seven ‘new learning’ affordances” opened up by digital media, accounting, from a pedagogical perspective, for the transformation of the teaching-learning process supported by digital technology.
By focusing on these environments' discursive dimension, this chapter reflects on how these new learning platforms have supported and fostered genuine digital language practices and new text architectures. This approach and the emphasis on how compositional architectures of digital texts are affected and shaped by these environments do not seem to have been sufficiently discussed and described (Manovich, 2013; Paveau, 2017) or are often addressed through a pre-digital perspective.
Thus, in order to reflect and characterize these digital language practices afforded by e-learning environments, we will ground our investigation in the theoretical framework proposed by Paveau (2017; 2019) to analyze digital-native discourse or technodiscourse. Paveau defines technodiscourse as digital-native discursive production on the internet, which mixes the linguistic and technical character in a heterogeneous, multisemiotic composite. The author marks an epistemological change and proposes an ecological, post-dualist perspective to analyze and understand online language practices.
In an attempt to account for the linguistic and the technical nature of digital language practices on the web, Paveau argues for a composite notion of language and discourse. It challenges the distinction between linguistic and extralinguistic elements, establishing a continuum between the subjects of language and their production environments. Thus, going back to the universe of e-learning environments, based on this theoretical perspective, we argue for an ecological analysis of these ecosystems’ affordances and the language practices supported by them, which is the focus of the present study. Which possibilities and patterns of use are predicted by the algorithms of these environments? How do they delineate the forms of interaction and the resources available for the meaning-making process? How do these algorithmic patterns and these “potentialities” shape the way meaning is made in digital texts and in technolanguage activities? Guided by these key questions, this chapter will characterize and analyze one e-learning environment – CGScholar – based on the platform's technodiscursive practices.
This chapter will focus specifically on some of the platform's spaces designed for participants' composition and interactions with each other's work, such as comments, and posts produced in the learning community/virtual classroom. Thus, we aim to examine the extent to which the nature of the productions developed in the context of e-learning environments can be related to digital-native practices, as defined by Paveau. Through a qualitative methodological approach, we will investigate and illustrate how digital learning ecologies designs/programs support the nature and complexity of technolanguage activities, based on Paveau’s work on technodiscourse.