Drawing on Judith Butler’s performativity, Science and Technology Studies posits that the materiality of things as well as the man-machine interactions is produced in social performances. Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers a different ontology of performativity, which is neither overly discursive (as Butler argues) nor does it overemphasise materiality at the cost of discursive constructions. This outlook therefore commingles both human and non-human entities in socio-technical frameworks such as online learning environments that put together offline and online contexts besides bringing together learners and technologies. The non-human actant represents material conditions while human entities account for social action with utterances. Technological failures apart, human entities can also be held responsible for the failure or success of a performative action that a technology ought to be facilitating in combination with the social action to be performed by the learner or the teacher. The performative potential of online exams of several entrance tests held for higher education or for admission to higher institutions posit the necessity of social-technical agencies wrought by both students who take exams and institutions that conduct them, teachers who prepare the exam, technicians who control the system and facilitate the smooth conduct of online exams. The failure of the performative potential of the technologies in this context is due to the assembly of socio-technical agencies, that is human and non-human entities.
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.