Digitality of information and artefacts is the spinoff of the internet era. With digitalization, the authenticity and centrality of information is destabilized. A book is a material artifact and the material form of the book not only stands for the cultural meanings contained in it but also for the attendant material authority. Digital artefacts are stripped of such canonical laws as everyone participates in the creation of digital texts. In that sense, digitalization has led to increasing dematerialization of texts and information artefacts. Materiality of a digital artifact is an emergent property and is not inherent in the information or the device that contains it ( See Writing Machines by Katherine Hayles ). Materiality is therefore not a technological feature but what the user/reader does with both technology and information contained therein. Further, the meanings of information are derived from the users’ interaction with both medium and content. The meaning making practices are therefore material and performative.
Published in Chapter:
Culture of Use of Moodle in Higher Education: Networked Relations between Technology, Culture and Learners
M. Shuaib Mohamed Haneef (Pondicherry University, India)
Copyright: © 2015
|Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-8598-7.ch014
Abstract
In this chapter, the use of Moodle, an open source Learning Management System (LMS), by the Department of Electronic Media and Mass Communication in Pondicherry University, as a means to supplement classroom teaching has been examined drawing on Actor Network Theory (ANT). This chapter reveals that the use of Moodle gives rise to a new digital culture which is inscribed on the prior cultural template that students, instructors and institutions bring to have a bearing on their teaching and learning activities. However, the rise of such a digital culture is due to the human and material assemblages constituted by how students and instructors inscribe their manifestoes on Moodle and how Moodle inscribes its manifestations on them. Further, the performative potential of Moodle is explained by its networked interaction with other social, human and non-human actors such as the culture of using technology for learning, digital literacy skills, emergent digital divide, access issues among students and teachers, educational and economic background and institutional media ecology among others.