About

Thanks for taking time to look at my site. I am an ESRC-funded PhD student in the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. My research and teaching interests are concerned with multimodality, assessment, digital cultures and learning spaces. You can contact me at  j.i.lamb@sms.ed.ac.uk and follow me on Twitter at @james858499.

This is a summary of my Doctoral Research:

‘A sonic ethnography of the digital shift across disciplines’
This thesis is concerned with the ways that the pedagogic and societal shift to the digital is affecting the nature of education. Taking the examples of undergraduate courses in American History and Architectural Design at a research-intensive university, I am investigating how the proliferation of digital technologies and networked content is influencing teaching and assessment, as well as the environments where learning takes place. I am using a broadly ethnographic and qualitative approach, with a particular emphasis on sonic materials and practices as a method of social inquiry. This approach, which is influenced by contemporary work in speculative research and the concept of the methods assemblage, is supported by interviews, observation and a digital journaling exercise. My research asks the following questions:
  1. How is teaching, learning and assessment in American History and Architectural Design influenced by the societal and pedagogic shift to the digital?
  2. How are the university’s learning environments affected by the proliferation of digital technologies and networked content?
  3. What are the implications for the university of the increasingly digital nature of teaching and learning?
  4. How can sonic methods enable us to critically investigate learning spaces and practices?

Working across my research data, and informed by conceptual work in sociomateriality and critical posthumanism, my thesis makes a number of arguments which carry implications for educational practice within our increasing digital society and learning environments. The central arguments from my research are as follows:

  1. The digital devices, search engines and social media spaces that are increasingly prevalent within education, depend on commercially-driven code and algorithms, which encourage forms of co-authorship in place of the lone scholar.
  2. An attention to the wide range of materials, interests and opportunities that contribute towards the performance of meaning, require a reconceptualisation of assessment as a sociomaterial assemblage, in place of the more traditional exchange of knowledge between student and marker.
  3. Ready access to the social spaces of the web, alongside networked academic content, dissolves the distinction between the dedicated teaching venues of the university and the domestic learning spaces beyond the campus boundary. Instead the campus is performed across a range of teaching venues, as well as social and domestic settings.
  4. Disciplinary traditions, programme priorities and personal interests contribute to a situation where the shift to the digital has a varying pedagogical impact across course contexts. From a methodological perspective meanwhile, my research makes the case for sonic ethnography within education research, where there currently exists a gap within the research.

Beyond my research I teach on the Education and Digital Cultures and Assessment, Learning and Digital Education courses, both within the MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, as was a teaching assistant on the recent edX Social Research Methods MOOC. I am also a co-author of the Manifesto for Teaching Online.

Other areas of current research include the learning spaces of online distance students, urban walking ethnography and sound within qualitative social research. 

I also look after the Elektronisches Lernen Muzik and Composition: Conversations about Content and Form project. 

I am a reviewer for the Visual Communication journals.