Slides for Drew Whitworth's seminar presentation at the University of Tromsø, Norway, 9th March 2017

1. Talking the digital
habitat into being
Andrew Whitworth (and Lee Webster), Manchester Institute
of Education, University of Manchester, UK
Al images in this presentation are © A. Whitworth unless stated.

2. Outline
• Prologue: the nature of employability
• Bridging the gap: HE learning into workplace learning
• Digital habitats and information landscapes
• The research problem: how to see
• Our project: context and data
• Conclusions: how to embed digital and information
literacy in broader pedagogical practices

3. What is ‘employability’?
Skills and competencies?
Disciplinary knowledge?
‘Soft skills’?
Critical thinking?

4. My answer would be, all of these,
and more….
Universities clearly have a responsibility to
instil each of these in their graduates, and employers
are looking for these capacities

5. But it is not like students are
toys that universities ‘fuel’ with
a substance called employability,
before letting them out into the
big wide world….

6. Bridging the gap between HE and work…
…requires not the possession of some
objective characteristic called ‘employability’…

7. Instead it is an outcome of learning — which seems obvious,
but we should remember it
How are we helping students configure their
networks, resources, practices etc. in ways that
will help them with the transition at the end of
their programme?

8. Workplace learning v HE
learning
HE: generally, more formal,
more individual, regulated
learning outcomes, stable,
predictable
Work: more informal, more
collaborative, fuzzier learning
outcomes, less stable, less
predictable

9. These differences have led to criticisms
of how universities help students develop
digital and information literacy.
See , for example, the work of Annemaree Lloyd (e.g. 2010, 2012)
Lloyd sees IL as the ability to
navigate an “information landscape”
These are context-specific practices…
Finding and making judgments about
the relevance of texts discovered in an
academic library…

10. …requires a quite different set of judgments and community
relationships than it does in professional or everyday settings

11. • Each workplace setting is a different information
landscape, with different architectures and
definitions of ‘literacy’
• We need to develop in graduates the ability to
build practices — configure the informational
environments of themselves and others
• This is employability as an outcome of learning…
• … so let us think about how we can develop it

12. Stewarding the digital
habitat
Not
‘natural’…
This environment (Borrowdale, Cumbria) is one that has been
nurtured and optimised

13. Stewarding “is a creative process…. facilitating a community’s
emergence and growth” (WWS p. 25)
Etienne Wenger (pictured),
Nancy White and John Smith
(2009): Digital Habitats
What communities do to
create an environment
that supports their learning
needs
Wenger et al describe the role of technology steward…

14. Stewards play various roles, including purchasing and
configuring technological tools that the community uses to learn
But it is not just about managing the
technological space and determining its
configuration….
Effective stewarding is also about developing the
capacity for stewarding in other community members

15. Ideally, a responsive digital habitat would evolve through
collaborative learning processes. The community as a whole would be
reflecting on its practices, and an environment created which would
build the capacity for transforming the digital habitat - stewarding - in
a broad range of stakeholders, something called for by Wenger et al
(2009, p. 27). The digital habitat should therefore not just facilitate use
of the habitat, but participation in the ongoing learning processes which
continuously shape the resources available to the community.
(Whitworth 2012, p. 50)

16. The problem in understanding these processes lies with
‘seeing’ and/or capturing them (Saracevic)
Information landscapes and digital habitats can
be seen as an accumulation of judgments
Why is this so difficult?

17. Problem 1: Hawthorne
effect
Observation can change the dynamics of behaviour and social
interactions.

18. Problem 2: post hoc
judgments/self-reporting
Various cognitive biases can come into play…
We are more likely to offer recollections
to interviewers that cast us in a good
light
We take credit for ‘success’ but blame others for
‘failure’ (there are others)
Essentially, the picture of past activity offered by an
interviewee is inevitably mediated and incomplete

19. Problem 3: artificial
situationsStudies of informational (or any other) behaviour
have long struggled to capture it ‘in nature’ (cf.
Saracevic 1975, 2007)
And can an HE environment
provoke information practices
that would carry over to the
workplace?
‘Set piece’ information search
tasks are easier to gather data on,
but introduce artificiality

20. • Taught postgraduate course, approx 60
students/year
• Distance learners and on-campus learners
collaborating in assessed online discussion
activities
• There are communicative goals to the activities
(learning course content)— but also instrumental
goals (achieving a good grade)
Our research context

21. The activity focused on here follows a field
trip to the National Football Museum (NFM)
Students are tasked with discussing the
design of some kind of technological
enhancement to the museum environment
Distance learners design their
own field trip, however….
… & the group have to
discuss one of these
alternate contexts as well
as the NFM

22. Thus, to succeed at this task (get a good grade), students have to:
• Communicate their experience of the different contexts to
other group members (using a range of media)
• Make collective judgments about the relevance of
particular technologies to the design task….
• both in terms of technological solutions for the
museums…
• …and the creation of a digital habitat that will support
their learning needs in this case

23. The dataset
• Two years’ cohorts (2015-16, 2016-17)
• 20 discussion groups in total
• Around a million words!
• Consent secured from all participants (Interviews
also completed with a sample)

24. The data are an on-the-spot record of how a
series of informal, but collectively validated
judgments were constantly generated by
discussion and how these judgments shaped the
technologies and informational resources each
group drew on to fulfil its task.

25. For example, student W:
@A, nice suggestions for the first app! Let's hear a few
more and come to a decision by when? Is Tuesday
evening (6pm UK time) too soon?
I also suggestions for the second museum. I visited the
origins centre in Johannesburg - you can view it at
http://www.origins.org.za/ [15/orange/3 11/4/16 16:55]
• Suggests schedule for the decision
• Validates prior suggestion for the design task
• Suggests source of information where his colleagues can find out
more about his alternate museum

26. On the other hand, several students (like B) prefer to share
image-based information.
As a on-site student, i can share my thoughts and the
pictures i have took with distance learners(maybe in the
next post). [15/orange/3 11/4/16 22:15]
Students use these different sources to make judgments, even
about contexts they have not visited… and to validate the
judgments of others…. Here, student A:
I like [W]’s suggestion about Origins museum, so I vote to it
with [C]. I have checked the website and it sounds
interesting. I suggest the idea about VR to be to this
museum and we will think more about it next week. It could
move the museum to be virtual. the visitor can walk virtually
inside the museum and be close to the exhibits and so on.
[15/orange/3 12/4/16 23:16]

27. Example: the saga of the wiki [15/White/3]
BB discussion boards are seen as
clunky, so J acts as steward:
“Being very pro-wiki I have created 4 wikis now
to help us with this project…” [12/4/16 23:34]
S (within 45 minutes) validates this judgment:
“I think the wikis are very reasonable and feasible. I think
wikis just assist us finishing our designs, we may not
need to put massive efforts on wikis, but it helps us to
build ideas.” [13/4/16 00:15]
These judgments were, in turn, contained within the
parameters of the design task, which constrained, but
also gave direction to the learning.

28. S goes on to explain that:
“Because [lecturer] said on the [task] description 'One final
point though — please remember, only what appears on this
board can be graded. If you use any other discussion medium
as a group, that's fine, but you'll need to post some kind of
summary of that 'external' discussion here if it is to be allowed
for in the grade.’ “ [13/4/16 00:15]
Constraint on digital habitat imposed — but not a limiting one as
they are still free to (and do) use the wiki instead.
This is not a constraint on the learners’ generating their own context;
but a call for the students to collectively develop information literate
practice in this context. (Inclusivity — information management)
S has reminded his fellow group members of this call.

29. C says:
“Thanks for this J - you have made me smile as I nearly said
in one of my earlier posts could we have a wiki (with your
name next to it!). Not only do you like a good wiki....we all like
a good wiki now.
Anyway they look good. However can I ask how you do the
colour for the text, I tried last time and never succeeded and if
I am going to be green, then I need to sort that out now.
Looking forward to hearing how to do this (I am sure it is really
easy and I am just being stupid).” [13/4/16 05:56]

30. J replies:
“No worries C :) There is a button that has a 'T' on it
with a small triangle indicating a drop
down menu on the top row of tools. If you click on that
triangle the colour menu will appear and
the text colour can then be changed. “ [13/4/16 21:30]
Following the selection and validation of the wiki as a tool,
here the stewarding role extends to technology coaching.
Conventional skills, yes, but it shows they are not
neglected within the group as members help each other
learn how to steward the environment they are configuring
around them.

31. But it doesn’t end there.
Prompted by a reminder about the activity parameters (but not a
demand to do things differently) J worries that the wiki posts
will not ‘count’ in assessment….
if it comes to it I think it may have to be the case that each one of
use will have re-post our wiki contributions on a thread. If we go
back to the wikis we can actually track the edits we have each
made and we can perhaps note at the top the date that it was
posted on the wiki. How do we feel about that? I'm sorry, feel a
bit guilty that I lead us down the wiki path without realising the
fruits of our labour would not be seen but at the same time I feel
it made the discussion a lot more effective that the threads would
have done! [21/4/16 17:45]

32. By the following day (22/4/16) all the wiki posts have been
copied and pasted onto the BB board by student J, with
colour coding (the red colouring is theirs)…
Post:
RE: Pasted from wiki - second museum choice
Author: [S]
I voted for National History Museum because there may have some
points for us to design but I am also thinking about The Acropolis
Museum which has a lot of advance technological applications. It is
more modern than the NFM. Climate change exhibition hall also has
some innovative applications as well. Maybe we can get some
inspirations from Acropolis Museum and Climate change exhibition
hall then apply some for the NFM.
[24/4/16 19:33]

33. Wenger’s definition of a ‘community of practice’:
negotiation of competence (in Lloyd’s terms — literacy)
The group are
clearly asserting
their freedom to
generate their
own digital
habitat….
…but when their activity
hits the ‘boundary’ that
is defined by the
parameters of the task…
…they choose to conform to what they perceive
as the technological demands of the ‘external’ setting

34. In summary, these data reveal the very fine detail of how students select inf
The digital habitat is being stewarded, but in a ‘protective’ way? —
the protection comes about to help it ‘fit properly’ with
the proscribed information practices [‘use the Board’]
Nevertheless, within these general boundaries the students are
collectively making judgments about what informational resources
to draw on in order to fulfil their learning needs.

35. • Employability-wise….
• They are learning how to draw on a range of
technological tools (the digital habitat) to take
collective decisions…
• How to validate their own judgments, and the
judgments of others…
• and how to give direction to their stewarding (as
opposed to random activity, or closed and parochial
concerns)

36. The data shed light on how HE institutions can enfold information and digit
It is about supporting the learning
community and its negotiation of
what it means to be competent
or literate in the community
context
…as opposed to the university context
and its definition of what ‘digital literacy’
and ‘information literacy’ mean
In fact it is that definition that constitutes a boundary object for this
community — something which does not constrain, but facilitates
their learning in this case.

37. –Drew Whitworth (drew.whitworth@manchester.ac.uk)
Tusen takk!