Jeffrey Keefer CPsquare Research and Dissertation Series Wednesday, 23 March 2011

At the beginning: 1. Learning through liveblogging 2. Transformative learning be supported and encouraged through technology-enhanced learning in a collaborative learning experience or community of practice E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University (toward a PhD)

1. Educational Explorations of Autoethnographic Inquiry: A Case Study 2. Autoethnographer Communities of Practice 3. Public Transformations: Adult Learners Who Use Social Media to Express and Understand Their Identities as Developing Researchers 4. Faculty Support: Doctoral Students, Threshold Concepts, and Technology Enhanced Learning 5. Diversity and Aha Moments in Doctoral Student Identity Development

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a disparate set of tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those relations. John Law (2007) as mentioned in Tara Fenwick (2010, p2)

1. First, actor-network theory is committed to symmetrical analysis, a principle which holds that the material and non-human elements of any network should be treated analytically in the same way as the social and human elements (Law, 1992). (Fox, 2005, p. 102)

2. Second, the object of actor-network theory informed analyses is not to explain the size of any network, but rather to elucidate how any network grows in influence and/ or contracts the analytical interest is to illuminate the processes, rather than explain end results, such as the size of a network at any point in time (Callon & Latour, 1981). (Fox, 2005, p. 102)

3. Third, the central work-process, through which any network expands/contracts, is a process of translation. In translation, one element stands in for another or many others (Callon, 1986a, b; Callon & Law, 1982), just like a word in one language stands in for another, or a symbol stands for many strings of symbols. When one thing stands for others, the others are black-boxed, that is, in a sense they are forgotten about, assumed, or presumed. In this context, the worldwide web is a globally networked inscription device, and networked learning is the name for a range of ways for learning to experience it and other realities through it. (Fox, 2005, p. 102)

How may an ANT approach to doctoral studies differ from any other approach, such as grounded theory or case study? How can we assign meaning to phenomena from only seeing these layers of networks? What insights can ANT bring to communities of practice?

Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2010). Actor-network theory in education. New York: Routledge. Fox, S. (2005). An actor-network critique of community in higher education: implications for networked learning. Studies in Higher Education, 30(1), doi: / Law, J. (2007). Making a mess with method. In W. Outhwaite & S. P. Turner (Eds.), Sage handbook of social science methodology (pp ). Beverly Hills: Sage.