Tracing connections and following the action

Lucila Carvalho (Massey University), Pippa Yeoman (University of Sydney) and I recently contributed to a symposium at the annual meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). We talked about three chapters from the edited collection that Lucila and I have put together, Postdigital Spaces of Learning: Towards Convivial, Equitable and Sustainable Spaces for Learning. The title of our session was 'Tracing connections and following the action: how sociomaterial and postdigital sensibilities help us appreciate the learning whole in action'.
​
In the symposium Pippa talked about her (incredibly moving and insightful) autoethnographic account of attempting to learn how to live with Long-Covid. In a strong field, it’s maybe my favourite chapter in the book (or my current favourite, anyway). Lucila described how we used photographs from the contributing authors in our book as a way of exploring and explaining some of the central assumptions of postdigital thinking, and what it has to offer learning spaces research. And I recounted aspects of an experiment where I considered whether and how the train journey could function as a postdigital learning space. Here are our three presentations:

Our contributions were part of a wider symposium, ‘Interrogating and Recoupling Learning and Knowledge with Networks and Power: Exploring Sociomateriality as a Foundational Theory for Research in the Learning Sciences’, and was expertly organised by Michael M Rook.  Michael is an independent researcher, and also Program Evaluator in the Directorate for STEM Education at the U.S. National Science Foundation. Michael’s input to the symposium was based on work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), but I’ll add here the disclaimer that any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the sessions were those of the participating authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

Bearing in mind the symposium presenters were globally dispersed rather than all being physically present in Buffalo (USA) where the ISLS conference was happening, Michael created this Padlet as a way of bringing together the different contributions to the symposium, and as a way of stimulating and collecting discussion. Well worth a look, and you can also add your own thoughts to the existing work on the Padlet board.