Counting on use of technology to enhance learning

In global policy documents, the language of Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) now firmly structures a perception of educational technology which ‘subsumes’ terms like Networked Learning and e-Learning. Embedded in these three words though is a deterministic, economic assumption that technology has now enhanced learning, and will continue to do so. In a market-driven, capitalist society this is a ‘trouble free’, economically focused discourse which suggests there is no need for further debate about what the use of technology achieves in learning. Yet this raises a problem too: if technology achieves goals for human beings, then in education we are now simply counting on ‘use of technology’ to enhance learning. This closes the door on a necessary and ongoing critical pedagogical conversation that reminds us it is people that design learning, not technology. Furthermore, such discourse provides a vehicle for those with either strong hierarchical, or neoliberal agendas to make simplified claims politically, in the name of technology. This chapter is a reflection on our use of language in the educational technology community through a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). In analytical examples that are ‘loaded’ with economic expectation, we can notice how the policy discourse of TEL narrows conversational space for learning so that people may struggle to recognise their own subjective being in this language. Through the lens of Lieras’s externality, desubjectivisation and closure (Lieras, 1996) we might examine possible effects of this discourse and seek a more emancipatory approach. A return to discussing Networked Learning is suggested, as a first step towards a more multi-directional conversation than TEL, that acknowledges the interrelatedness of technology, language and learning in people’s practice. Secondly, a reconsideration of how we write policy for educational technology is recommended, with a critical focus on how people learn, rather than on what technology is assumed to enhance.

Consumers' responses to sponsorship by foreign companies

Purpose: The study aims to explore the novel issue of how consumers perceive sponsorship initiatives by foreign companies and how the sponsors' country-of-origin (COO) cue may influence sponsorship outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: The measurement model and proposed relationships were tested based on a sample of 811 Chinese consumers using confirmatory factor analysis and structural path analysis. Findings: The results reveal that attitudes toward the sponsor completely mediate the effect of event involvement on willingness to buy from the sponsor (WBS). Attitudes toward the sponsor also partially mediate the relationship between economic animosity towards a specific sponsor's COO and WBS. Additionally, the level of a country's economic competitiveness found to moderate the negative relationship between economic animosity, attitudes toward the sponsor and WBS. Research limitations/implications: The nature of the product type and the desire of the consumer to own such a product may have influenced the measurement of willingness to buy. Practical implications: The research adds to the existing knowledge by identifying the opportunities and potential biases that a foreign company may encounter when considering sponsoring a mega sport event in a different cultural context. The study helps managers to understand how sports sponsorship could be used effectively in emerging markets. Originality/value: The proposed conceptual model advances the application of classical conditioning theory, the consumer animosity model of foreign product purchase and the belief-attitude-intention hierarchy in the sponsorship arena. It is the first investigation of the role of event involvement and economic animosity in understanding sponsorship responses. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Speaker positioning in interpreter-mediated press conferences

This article investigates potential effects which (the recontextualisation of) interpreted discourse can have on the positioning of participants. The discursive event which forms the basis of the analysis are international press conferences which bring politicians and journalists together. The dominant question addressed is: (How) do interpreter-mediated encounters influence the positioning of participants and thus the construction of interactional and social roles? The article illustrates that methods of (critical) discourse analysis can be used to identify positioning strategies which are employed by participants in such triadic exchanges. The data come from press conferences which involve English, German, and French as source and target languages.

Resisting the final word:challenging stale media and policy representations of students’ performative technological encounters in university education

This article explores powerful, constraining representations of encounters between digital technologies and the bodies of students and teachers, using corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It discusses examples from a corpus of UK Higher Education (HE) policy documents, and considers how confronting such documents may strengthen arguments from educators against narrow representations of an automatically enhanced learning. Examples reveal that a promise of enhanced ‘student experience’ through information and communication technologies internalizes the ideological constructs of technology and policy makers, to reinforce a primary logic of exchange value. The identified dominant discursive patterns are closely linked to the Californian ideology. By exposing these texts, they provide a form of ‘linguistic resistance’ for educators to disrupt powerful processes that serve the interests of a neoliberal social imaginary. To mine this current crisis of education, the authors introduce productive links between a Networked Learning approach and a posthumanist perspective. The Networked Learning approach emphasises conscious choices between political alternatives, which in turn could help us reconsider ways we write about digital technologies in policy. Then, based on the works of Haraway, Hayles, and Wark, a posthumanist perspective places human digital learning encounters at the juncture of non-humans and politics. Connections between the Networked Learning approach and the posthumanist perspective are necessary in order to replace a discourse of (mis)representations with a more performative view towards the digital human body, which then becomes situated at the centre of teaching and learning. In practice, however, establishing these connections is much more complex than resorting to the typically straightforward common sense discourse encountered in the Critical Discourse Analysis, and this may yet limit practical applications of this research in policy making.

Learning from a deceptively spacious policy discourse

In this chapter, the way in which varied terms such as Networked learning, e-learning and Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) have each become colonised to support a dominant, economically-based world view of educational technology is discussed. Critical social theory about technology, language and learning is brought into dialogue with examples from a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of UK policy texts for educational technology between1997 and 2012. Though these policy documents offer much promise for enhancement of people’s performance via technology, the human presence to enact such innovation is missing. Given that ‘academic workload’ is a ‘silent barrier’ to the implementation of TEL strategies (Gregory and Lodge, 2015), analysis further exposes, through empirical examples, that the academic labour of both staff and students appears to be unacknowledged. Global neoliberal capitalist values have strongly territorialised the contemporary university (Hayes & Jandric, 2014), utilising existing naïve, utopian arguments about what technology alone achieves. Whilst the chapter reveals how humans are easily ‘evicted’, even from discourse about their own learning (Hayes, 2015), it also challenges staff and students to seek to re-occupy the important territory of policy to subvert the established order. We can use the very political discourse that has disguised our networked learning practices, in new explicit ways, to restore our human visibility.