A doctoral researcher community on Twitter: An actor-network explication of #PhDchat
Jeffrey M. Keefer, Visiting Nurse Service of New York / New York University
Late in 2010, a small group of postgraduate students discussed meeting on Twitter to discuss areas of interest to doctoral students. This developed into the hash tag #phdchat, which began informally with synchronous discussions on Wednesdays at 19.30 GMT, loosely focused around topics voted upon by anybody wishing to participate. The concept expanded to include people, primarily doctoral students, who discussed areas of shared interest such as motivations for doing a PhD or analysing data, along with various technologies of interest. From the time #phdchat Tweets began to be tracked to the time Twitter limited API use a few months later, there were 4,876 individual Tweets using the #phdchat tag. The 10 most active Tweeters using the tag during this period accounted for 52% of all the Tweets, even though there were 362 unique participants contributing at least once during this period.
What did they talk about? While this seems a natural question with such intensive users, it may be a limiting question to consider, as it only looks at the surface result of the phenomenon, rather than at what held this informal network together. Instead, this research takes its inspiration from Latour’s notion that we need “to follow the actors themselves” (2005, p. 12), seeking to “avoid imposing our own views about what is right or wrong, or true and false” when considering social and technical interactions without distinguishing between human or non-human actors (Law & Callon, 1988, p. 284). The assembled bursts of Twitter activity is the result of the contributions of this active group of participants, with the central assembly being the hashtag #phdchat itself. This tag itself will be followed during this period of time, explicating how and in what ways the participation in the synchronous and asynchronous Twitter chats moved and enlisted other actors to bring meaning and support to those involved. This research will be presented as an interactive Pecha Kucha, with participants invited to use a Twitter tag during the session to focus on the issues raised and responses shared amongst those present and distant to the symposium.
Keywords
Twitter, #phdchat, actor-network theory, ANT, doctoral studies
Blended Simulation Based Medical Education: A Durable Network for Learning?
Armineh Shahoumian, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, Gale Parchoma, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Jacky Hanson, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals National Health Service (NHS) Trust
Simulation based medical education (SBME) is gradually becoming an inseparable part of medical and Professionals Allied to Medicine (PAM) education. The demand to use this training approach in healthcare is increasing every year to meet the Department of Health’s Standards for Better Health (NESC, 2008). As an alternative training approach SBME provides medical students and practitioners with near real-life opportunities to practice and improve clinical and non-clinical skills and improve health care services as a result. Although SBME is already a very popular training approach, Kneebone (2005) argues it is “often accepted uncritically, with undue emphasis being placed on technological sophistication at the expense of theory-based design” (p.549). SBME is “a complex service intervention” (McGaghie, 2009, p.50), which includes much more than a series of advanced technologies utilised for simulating an event. SBME is actualised by a network of closely knit human, non-human, and “conceptual and symbolic” (Bleakley, 2012, p.464) actors that work in an interrelated manner “as a basis to promoting learning and innovation” (Bleakley, p.464). It is not just the sophistication of the technology that supports learning but the dialogic relation of all the actors involved in creating the opportunities for learning. What is required to develop a ‘healthy’ and ‘growing’ network that promotes learning and innovation (Bleakley, 2012) or hinder effective learning hasn’t widely been investigated. Bleakley argues that actor network theory (ANT) “serves to repair the historical separation of theory and practice” (p. 465). To understand SBME as a complex process involving technology, people, objects, artefacts, actions, and places, ANT may introduce new insight, “an interruption or intervention, a way to sense and draw nearer” (Fenwick & Edwards 2010: ix) to the phenomenon of SBME. This paper expands the understanding of how actors interact with each other within a network and the practices that support/hinder blended learning in the Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHTR) Simulation Centre (SC). Outcomes provide insight into the design of a simulation session, describe the assemblage of a blended learning in SBME (B-SBME) actor network, and illustrate an example of the network effects of mediators’ and intermediaries’ capacities to form alliances between a B-SBME networked assemblage and broader Trust networks.
Keywords
Simulation Based Medical Education, Blended Learning, Actor Network Theory, Practices
The uncodings of ANT: Mobilities of digital data
Terrie Lynn Thompson, School of Education, University of Stirling
One of the basic tenets of Actor Network Theory (ANT) is to “follow the actors”. However, coded materialities (the digital in all its forms, including software, devices, networks, artefacts, and algorithms) are notoriously fickle. Digital things are often described as unbounded, evasive, distributed, and constantly mutating (Kallinikos, Aaltonen & Marton, 2010). Indeed, the web, as portrayed by Czerski (2012), seems to simply exist as flow. So how do networked learning researchers reckon with these mobilities and multiplicities? As a form of posthumanist theorizing, ANT-inspired researchers attend to how the assemblings of “thingly gatherings” co-constitute enactments of everyday practices with, in, around, and through human actors. Therefore, ANT seems to offer an ontological questioning and framing that can engage with the fluidity of the digital. In this short paper (and Pecha Kucha presentation), I call on ANT to explore how the digital interposes data within the research process—freezing, thawing, excluding, including—beckoning researchers to attend to the sociality of data. The discussion that follows the presentation will draw on real-time examples from the other papers in this symposium to explore the mobilities of digital data. In moving to a posthuman framing, data—a blackboxed materiality of research projects—becomes much more complex. A sociomaterial reading of data suggests it is a relational effect: becoming in a particular moment because of juxtapositions of multiple networks. Such a conceptualization of data raises several questions. First, how does one theorize the role of the digital in the production of social data and the research process? Second, the encoding of data has amplified its mobility and performativity: it is distributed, often public, fragmented, and entangled in multiple recursive circulations. It takes on new forms and energies. Tensions become apparent, for example as dynamic digital data, at home in the wilderness of the web, is translated to the archived (or frozen) data that appears in screen captures or pdf journal articles. Here, the mobility and fluidity of data (the state of always becoming and creating ongoing movements in understanding) wrestles with practices of solidifying data (freezing or tethering: settling down and settling into a particular locality). This tension provides one entry point for examining the mobilities and socialities of data.
Keywords
Actor Network Theory, digital data, research methodology, social media
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