Immutable mobile is a term coined by Latour (1986) AU24: The in-text citation "Latour (1986)" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. and he used it to describe things that are easy to reproduce and transport without changing their inherent characteristics. Latour explains this term by drawing on the printing press. The printing press, for the first time, allowed ideas to move out of local and temporary places and spaces and spread across the world unlike the primal way of information dissemination that circulated within small territories. Besides, the printing press reproduced messages without distortion unlike face-to-face communication in which the message gets modified from person to person. We encounter immutable mobiles in internet technologies when the objects have the properties of being mobile (technologies and textual mobilities) but also immutable.
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.