| 1. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Teachers’ (future) digital work within platform infrastructures
- 2021
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Ingår i: Paper for "The Future of Work" - examining discourses and social practices. International and interdisciplinary conference, Sorbonne University, Paris, France November 25-26, 2021..
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper focuses on the inscribed uses and imaginaries of teachers’ digital work, currently formed through school platform infrastructures. Based on Swedish and Australian project cases, where the public education sector has experienced a substantial marketization and deep penetration of commercial platform infrastructures, we explore current imaginaries and driving forces of digital work. Our ethnographical material is teacher and management interviews, platform studies, activity logs and infrastructural policies. Theoretically, we approach digital work as constituted by socio-technical assemblages, made from social practices and technology inscriptions within cross-platform infrastructures (Plantin et al 2018), that prescribe particular forms of digital work, which make the existing and future work of teachers visible, thinkable and actionable in particular ways. From our two cases superficial differences appear but ultimately the same logics are evident; a highly visible discourse of the teacher professional, in charge of the platform work and simply supported or augmented in their professional judgements. One example is how platform providers and policies promote interoperability and automation across platforms (cf. Perotta et al 2021). In reality and in combination with the business logic of educational platforms (Kerssens & van Dijck 2021), the discourse is highly questionable. It positions teachers as rentieers (Komljenovic 2021), expected to manage digital work seamlessly regardless of platform provider or accompanied by a (robot) colleague or application (Selwyn 2021). Concurrently, teachers are expected to act as creators of school data production for providing school results (Foucault 1975) on platforms where data exploitation however is rule and data ownership unregulated. At least three powerful forces elevate the digital work; 1) disruptive situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic where teachers are to solve the situation, 2) public sector reform, exposing teachers to increased public accountability, and 3) teacher care for students to provide social support and compensating for structural inequalities. References: Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir. Gallimard. Kerssens, N., & van Dijck, J. (2021). The platformization of primary education in The Netherlands. Learning, Media and Technology. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2021.1876725 Komljenovic, J. (2021). The rise of education rentiers: digital platforms, digital data and rents, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2021.1891422 Perotta, C., Gulson K.N., Wiliamson, B., and Witzenberger K. (2021). Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1): 97- 113. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2020.1855597 Plantin, J.-C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N., & Sandvig, C. (2018). Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society, 20(1), 293-310. Selwyn, N. (2021). Digital labor meets the classroom. Research Intelligence, 145. http://der.monash.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Research-Intelligence-DEC-2020.pdf
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Critical Digital Infrastructures Revealed: Big Tech and Public Education Sector Issues at Stake
- 2023
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Ingår i: European Conference on Educational Research, Glasgow, UK 22-25 August 2023.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The so-called GAFAM big-tech companies of Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Apple, and Microsoft are well-recognized gatekeepers to critical digital infrastructures in public sectors like education. However, the role they have as pillars within the infrastructure of the internet is commonly invisible to users, not least their “cloud-services” that adopt the so-called “as-a-service” infrastructure model (e.g. STorage-as-a-Service, IDentity-as-a-Service). These cloud-services are highly profitable. For example, in 2021 Amazon Web Services accounted for around 20% of the company's revenue, but nearly 75% of profits (Amazon, n.d.). Thus, the market and social value of these infrastructures motivates the big-tech presence (Birch et al., 2021) and as an increasingly data-intensive sector, public education is an attractive customer. Considering the incentives for expanding cloud-services and the already large infrastructurally installed bases (Star & Ruhleder, 1996) GAFAM companies have in schools, we set out to empirically unpack the ongoing infrastructuring that governs education (Ratner & Gad, 2019; Selwyn, 2015). For this purpose, we have developed a web-based tool, InfraReveal (infrareveal.net), for visualizing the cloud-services underlying educational platforms using techniques that reveal data-packet traffic as users access internet. The tool has been used in sessions with schoolteachers in Sweden with the purpose of enhancing their critical digital infrastructural understandings (part of the RED project focused on global digital education inequalities, edu-digitalinequality.org). While earlier critical studies have considered the influence that GAFAM have on public education through user-facing businesses and through analysis of marketing-technical documentation (e.g. Williamson et al., 2022), we set out to demonstrate and engage with schoolteachers in critical discussions on infrastructuring. Our work builds on the tradition of infrastructure studies focusing on critical infrastructural features such as “ubiquity, reliability, invisibility, gateways, and breakdown” (Plantin et al., 2018: 294), combined with computational methods. The results draw on the real-time visualisations produced by InfraReveal to unpack how and where GAFAM companies are involved in controlling key digital infrastructures for education and achieve market provision dominance. They illustrate the how and where of an increasing dependence on GAFAM that can be argued to be a risk as market logics supersede public sector values (van Dijck et al., 2018), an issue targeted in emerging policy regulations on digital services and markets (European Commission, 2022). Taking the visualizations produced by InfraReveal as a starting point, issues like the role of GAFAM in critical education infrastructures, global infrastructural inequalities affecting education, and the lack of public debate on Sweden’s marketized cloud-service school infrastructure are discussed. References Amazon. (n.d.). Quarterly results. Amazon.com, Inc. Retrieved Jan 17 2023, from https://ir.aboutamazon.com/quarterly-results/default.aspx Birch, K., Cochrane, D., & Ward, C. (2021). Data as Asset? The Measurement, Governance, and Valuation of Digital Personal Data by Big Tech. Big Data & Society, 8(1). European Commission (2022). Regulation on Digital Services Act. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj Plantin, J. C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N., & Sandvig, C. (2018). Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310. Ratner, H., & Gad, C. (2019). Data Warehousing Organization: Infrastructural Experimentation with Educational Governance. Organization 26(4), 537–552. Selwyn, N. (2015). Data Entry: Towards the Critical Study of Digital Data and Education. Learning, Media and Technology 40(1), 64–82. Star, S.L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research 7, 111–134. van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford University Press. Williamson, B., Gulson, K. N., Perotta, C., & Witzenberger, K. (2022). Amazon and the New Global Connective Architectures of Education Governance. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 231–256.
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| 4. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Critically Examining Education Digitalisation – Nordic Empirical, Conceptual and Methodological Contributions
- 2023
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Ingår i: Symposium for the Nordic Education Research Association Conference, "Digitalization and Technologies in Education Opportunities and Challenges", 15-17 March 2023, Oslo Norway.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Symposium participants: Discussant(s): Neil Selwyn - Monash University, Australia 1 ‘We just have to trust them’ - Professional Responsibility in Digital Practices - Ida Martinez Lunde, University of Oslo 2 Lost in Digital Transformations? - Cathrine Tømte, University of Agder 3 Tracing Global Platformisation Locally: Differences and Inequalities in Teachers’ Digital Work in Publicly and Privately Owned Schools - Annika Bergviken Rensfeldt, Catarina Player-Koro, Thomas Hillman & Mona Lundin, University of Gothenburg 4 The Desires of Privatization in Ed-Tech Assemblages - Antti Paakkari, Anna Siippainen 5 Speculative Fiction of Digital Futures in Higher Education, Hanna Teräs, Marko Teräs & Juho Suoranta, Tampere University This symposium aims to draw together researchers engaged in research on education digitalisation in the Nordic countries who share an interest in critically examining how digital technologies are integrated into education systems, policies, institutions and practices. The overall question raised is: What are the critical issues on education digitalisation raised from the Nordic countries, and how can they be examined empirically, conceptually and methodologically? There are two important starting points for this symposium. Firstly, that the politico-economic push for education digitalisation is a decades-long process both on a global scale and within the Nordic countries. The ongoing push has had wide-ranging consequences for the power relations between public education, educational practices and actors as new alignments with private ed-tech businesses and digital platforms have been established. Secondly, that research on the topic is fruitfully based on the premise that many education practices nowadays are deeply interwoven with digital technologies and that new forms of inequalities and power imbalances appear. As the boundaries between digital and non-digital practices are blurring, this suggests that we re-think concepts and methods in line with the transformations referred to as the “postdigital turn” (Jandrić & Knox, 2022). The critical approaches often used in Nordic research on education digitalisation share interests in seeing digital technologies as mutually shaped with social practices, and education digitalisation as a dynamic and complex matter, played out socially, politically, economically and culturally. The research to be presented in this symposium includes, but is not limited to, explorations of concepts like relationality, processuality, network, assemblage, socio-materialism, and performativity (c.f. Castaneda & Williamson, 2021). As a part of this, a commonly shared interest is how different forms of education policy processes, regulations and discourses on digitalisation are enacted, translated and re-shaping education and educational practices. The research presented draws on ongoing discussions within critical and digital research in education, and on discussion of what the relevant contributions from the Nordic contexts are whether they be empirical, conceptual or methodological. The research to be discussed will include themes such as: –Platformisation, datafication and AI –Digital and non-digital inequalities and new power imbalances –Sustainable (post-)digital education work and futures The aim of the symposium is to address the NERA 2023 theme by: –providing empirical, conceptual and methodological contributions from scholars critically investigating opportunities and challenges related to the digitalisation of education. –identifying and discussing the critical questions and issues on the digitalisation of education that must be raised in the Nordic countries to create sustainable education systems that can contribute to the common good for both individuals and society.
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| 5. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Inequalities of Professional Learning on Social Media Platforms
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference, "Challenges of Digital Inequality - Digital Education, Digital Work, Digital Life", Berlin, Germany, 2019. - : Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung. - 2510-7666. - 9783967010008
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Professional learning on social media is generally framed as unproblematic, but the transition to these platforms marks a change as professionals’ work is conditioned by their logic and economy. In this paper, our focus is how problematic inequalities of teachers’ professional learning around access, participation and resources are produced as their professional exchanges is formed by social media participation. Three aspects of inequality have been examined. First, the performance of teachers’ (un)equal professional opportunities; second, (un)equal access to resources; and third, (un)equal ex-istential opportunities for professional development. We draw on examination of three-years of APIdata from a large teacher Facebook-group asking, who can participate (gender, location), what voices are heard (status, language), and how does the social media platform condition professional exchange and participation? Our results consider the opportunities and costs for teachers as individuals, profes-sionals and intellectuals. They reveal problematic temporal aspects such as work intensification, and limited professional exchange, partly conditioned by the platform functionality.
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| 6. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Powers forming the digitized teacher subjectivity: Self-technologies and algorithmic powers
- 2016
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Ingår i: Foucault at 90, University of West Scotland, Ayr campus. June 22-23 2016, Scotland..
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper explores how social media sites, exemplified by activities within a large Facebook group of teachers with an interest in IT in the classroom, are part of forming a certain desirable teacher subjectivity, which can be defined as digitally present, competent and networking. Rather than presupposing or idealising social media activities, we are interested in how the teacher subjectivity is shaped by both social and technological powers. Empirically, we draw on material produced by collecting the interactions within a Facebook group with over 13,000 members between 2012 and 2015. This group is focused on ‘flipped classrooms,’ often described as a grass-roots movement of teachers interested in changing classroom practice by engaging students in pre-class activities through social media, user-generated content and online educational resources. This ‘movement’ is thereby heavily imbued with how social media operates and the ideals of a digitally competent, networked and self-managing teacher subjectivity. Our aim is to theorize and problematize the subjectivity formed in and by social media activities in the group. In particular, we want to address algorithmic powers (Beer, 2009), i.e. various filtering and sorting computational actions that shape what subjects encounters online. These actions are dependent on the data input of subjects, who thereby produce their own algorithmic profile. With this approach, we stress the user’s function as provider of profiled marketable data rather than solely as content provider (van Dijck, 2009). The questions raised concern how subjects conduct themselves and how social media surveillance mechanisms like algorithmic profiling co-constitute the subjectivity? We examine three distinct but intertwined aspects of how the Facebook group activities give shape to the subjectivity we call the ‘digitized teacher.’ Firstly, ways technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988) operate as teacher subjects are modifying and operating upon ‘digital selves’ by posting, commenting and liking. Secondly, ways Facebook algorithms individually curate and profile feeds and content based on algorithmic surveillance of user behaviour and input data within and outside the group. Lastly, we problematize how we as researchers co-produce social media surveillance and the subjectivity formation of the digitized teacher based on the methodology used. Beyond adding to educational research on emerging practices of liberal self-conducted powers shaping the digitized teacher subjectivity, the main contribution of this paper is to address questions of how self-powers are fuelled by surveillance powers, for example, as the notion of algorithmic powers seem to become incorporated in subjects’ own conduct of themselves. References Beer, D. (2009). Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media & Society 11(6), 985–1002. Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In: L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton (Eds.). Technologies of the self. (pp. 16–49). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Van Dijck, J. (2009). Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content. Media, Culture & Society, 31(1), 41–58.
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| 7. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Pressed for Time? : How Platform Infrastructures and Professional Demands condition Teachers’ Digital Work
- 2021
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Ingår i: European Conference on Educational Research.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- What had often been praised by techno-enthusiasts as “disruption” and “innovation” became more of a harsh reality during 2020 with the fast reorganization to online learning due to the pandemic. With a short timeframe, schools were forced to prepare for distance education and teachers had to adapt, creating online teaching activities while at the same time making sure students were well-cared for educationally, socially, emotionally, and technologically. With the fast reorganization to online learning during the pandemic, the global platform market received more influence and further reached into the core of schools’ everyday work (Williamson & Hogan, 2020). In this sense, fast digitalization has not only made the political economy of school digitalization more apparent, but also highlights how digital work is conditioned by time and the socio-technical coordination of people and technologies (Wajcman, 2015). This paper focus on how teachers regulate and are regulated by digital platform work and in particular, how digital work is regulated by time in different ways. Our interest is both the kind of work done by teachers on digital platforms and how platform infrastructures condition and challenge teachers’ work and work time. The purpose is to explore and problematize the temporal governance of digital work, inscribed in the uses and logics of digital platforms, and forms of governing powers where productivity is considered core value. Analytically, instances where there are pronounced tensions in terms of temporal issues, between the demands of digital infrastructures or professional performance, and school teachers’ everyday work priorities and regulated work hours is of particular interest. The study builds on analyses of already identified tensions in relation to school reforms more generally as existing between the regulating principles of market efficiency governance and the teaching profession’s work conditions (Anderson & Cohen, 2015; Ball, 2003; Lundström & Parding, 2011). The political economy that pushes for school digitization was already strong in Europe and many other parts of the world before the pandemic began. Platform infrastructures, commonly provided by global platform businesses like Google and Microsoft and through Learning Management Systems are not exotic anymore, but are instead everyday technologies in workplaces like schools. Even so, platform technology provided by for example Google increasingly has taken the role of an infrastructure, sociotechnically connecting clouds, software, people, data (Plantin et al., 2018). This “platformization” comes with the business logic of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017), profiting on the individuals’ data production with the arguments of making public sector workplaces more efficient and streamlined, and of facilitating teachers’ pedagogical and administrative work. Questions around workload and the intensification of teachers’ work have once again risen up the political agenda (c.f. Fitzgerald et al., 2019). However, research on how school teachers’ work and work situations are changing in relation to digitalization still is relatively scarce (Bergviken Rensfeldt, Hillman, Selwyn, 2018; Selwyn, 2020; Selwyn, Nemorin & Johnson, 2017; Shulte, 2019). We draw on a Swedish project case, in collaboration with and extending an Australian project (e.g. Selwyn, Nemorin & Johnson, 2017). Empirical material was collected in and connected to the digital work of teachers in two upper secondary school forms, two school forms that characterize the Swedish marketized education system, namely, one public school and one independent for-profit school. Methodologically, the ethnographical approach used is policy and infrastructure ethnography, combined with trace ethnography of teachers’ online and offline work. Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used For conducting the policy ethnography, we firstly examined the policies and infrastructures implicated in teachers’ work, combining analyses of policies and platform technologies (Kitchen & Laurialt, 2014). Policy material from the regional municipality or school consortia organizations of the two schools, including extensions to national and European or international levels, e.g. strategies, guidelines, agreements on work time, digital work and platform infrastructure implementation, maintenance and support, was combined with analyses of the digital platforms and applications used in the school organizations of the participating teachers in the study. Further information from stakeholders like IT management or external platform provider companies on decisions, regulations and functionality on these different levels of platform use or data platform infrastructures, e.g. classifications of work activities in data platform standards was also collected via policy documents and interviews. Starting from the schools in the selection of policies and moving out from them, have resulted in a variety of policies that can be considered influencing digital work. In line with this, rather than regarding policies as archival documents, we aimed at selecting policies that were in use, “at work” and perhaps contested in the school workplaces in different ways. The trace ethnography started with four teachers (one man and one woman from each school) self-reporting their own activity logs on digital work based on three selected work days, followed up by a form of online focus group interview which was based on the logs and questions raised from the researchers and focus of the study. The teachers were then also involved in identifying and documenting their own data production and the traces they leave on different digital platforms via a digital self-tracking application capturing time-based screen activity. Conducting digital trace ethnography raise ethical concerns around private integrity which we have tried to counteract by involving the teacher participants themselves in self-tracking of their digital activities of work and by providing tools (self-reported activity logs included) allowing self-reflection of when and where their digital work takes place. The integrative trace ethnography approach (Geiger & Ribes, 2011) used, hence include both ethnographic and computational social science methods. These methods are themselves characterized by temporal categories, timelines, etc. but invites for making visible different temporalities in the ethnographic material. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings Digital work was analyzed based on tensions between temporalities that could be both static and dynamic but nonetheless were shaping teachers’ work (c.f. Thompson & Cook, 2017). The temporalities were understood as constructs and intertwined with spatialities of school teachers’ digital work. A preliminary finding is that digital work of online learning follows the assigned task and rhythms of schooling, but also extends more widely with the global time of digital platforms and the different temporalities produced in such environments, expanding, fragmentarizing and interrupting work in different ways. In line with Alirezabeigi, Masschelein & Decuypere (2020, p. 203), the digital work activities “not only follow the school time-table and the script of the teacher, but it equally follows the global time”. For example, the analyses included the teacher’s officially-regulated working hours in terms of classroom and workplace time, their self-regulated work time (“förtroendearbetstid”) as well as non-regularized time, all governed by certain ideals of performativity (c.f. Ball, 2003). Similarly, such entities were also translated into platforms datafication classifications of standard school activities (mainly teaching, examining and “other activities”). Hence, digital work temporalities were co-created with the operating tasks prompted by commercial platforms and activities inscribed in the systems, and the overall life cycles of platform infrastructures (updates, procurements, etc). Furthermore, the pandemic situation from March 2020 made certain temporalities around digital work visible, describing a “before-during-after Corona”, with transformed digital work experiences around attending to students and fulfilling new work tasks, implicating work intensification, strategies for work-life balance and coping with presence bleed. In sum, different temporalities and concerns in teachers’ digital work are at work, co-shaped by professional concerns, and the political economy and governance of platform infrastructures, which further add to the aforementioned research which identified tensions of market governance and teachers’ work conditions and professional concerns. References Alhadeff-Jones, M. (2018). Time and the Rhythms of Emancipatory Education Rethinking the temporal complexity of self and society. Routledge. Alirezabeigi, S., Masschelein, J., & Decuypere, M. (2020). Investigating digital doings through breakdowns: a sociomaterial ethnography of a Bring Your Own Device school, Learning, Media and Technology, 45(2), 193-207. Anderson, G., & Cohen, M I. (2015). Redesigning for identities of teachers and leader: A framework for studying new professionalism and educator resistance. Education Policy Archives, 23(85), 1-25. Ball, S. J. (2003) “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity.” Journal of Education Policy 18(2), 215-228. Bergviken Rensfeldt, A., Hillman, T., & Selwyn, N. (2018). Teachers ‘liking’ their work? Exploring the realities of teacher Facebook groups. British Journal of Education Research, 44(2), 230-250. Decuypere, M. & Vanden Broeck, P. (2020). Time and educational (re-)forms: Inquiring the temporal dimension of education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52(6), 602-612. Fitzgerald, S., McGrath-Champ, S., Stacey, M., Wilson, R. & Gavin, M. (2019). Intensification of teachers’ work under devolution:
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| 8. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Self-tracking as a Method for Exploring Teacher Digital Work
- 2023
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Ingår i: Paper for ReNEW Nordic Challenges conference 24-26 May, Oslo.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Recurrently it is reported on worsened teacher work conditions (Education International, 2020) with increased workload and work intensification. Digitalization is often raised both as an opportunity for counteracting time pressure and work more effectively, but it is also seen as a challenge, extending work in time-space also beyond labour safeguards. The question is, how can digital work and work time be investigated and better understood? In this paper, we will discuss the methodological considerations made during the Swedish worklife-funded project Balanced, focusing on teacher digital work (im)balances. We exemplify the challenges of taking an integrative trace ethnographic and computational social science method approach (Geiger & Ribes, 2011), to monitor and using “self-tracking” digital methods to map teacher digital work on platforms, and the deselections of certain methods. The chosen methods allowed the move from ‘the inside out’, by engaging teachers in self-reported activity logs, paired reflexive trace interviews and data visualisation generations, complemented by digital walkthroughs methods, and moves out to infrastructural mappings and policies. The issue raised is what the implications are of inviting teachers to self-track and reflect on the possibilities and constraints of their digital work in terms of improving and developing the understanding and conditions of Swedish teachers’ digital work. The issue raised connects to the emerging debate on monitoring work in more detail (Ball, 2021) through trace data computations, both in work-life and in research, made in the name of improving work conditions, but which nontheless might provide new work-related problems, e.g. of data privacy harms (Hakami et al., 2021), or control loss and distrust experiences (Berstrom & Svare, 2017). References Ball, K. (2021). Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in the Workplace. Literature review and policy recommendations. European Commission. Berstrom, V.H., & Svare, H. (2017). Significance of monitoring and control for employees’ felt trust, motivation and mastery. Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies 7(4), 29-49. Geiger, R. S., & Ribes, D. (2011). Trace ethnography: Following coordination through documentary practices. In 2011 44th Hawaii international conference on system sciences (pp. 1-10). IEEE. Hakimi, L., Eynon, R., & Murphy, V. A. (2021). The ethics of using digital trace data in education: A thematic review of the research landscape. Review of Educational Research, 91(5), 671–717. Thompson, G. (2021). Global Report on the Status of Teachers. Education International.
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| 9. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Teachers ‘liking’ their work? Exploring the digital labor of networked professional publics.
- 2017
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Ingår i: Selected Papers of #AoIR2017: The 18th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, 18-21 October 2017, Tartu, Estonia... - : Tartu, Estonia: AoIR..
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Social media are now an important aspect of the professional lives of school teachers. This paper explores the growing use of organized ‘teacher groups’ and ‘teacher communities’ on social media platforms such as Facebook. While these online communities are usually celebrated as a welcome means of professional learning and support, the paper explores the extent to which teacher Facebook groups might be understood as ‘work’. Drawing on a detailed examination of a Swedish thematic teacher Facebook group of over 13,000 members, the paper first considers aspects of the online community that could be seen as professionally beneficial and/or valuable – particularly in terms of information exchange and identity-work. Yet while perceived as a relatively beneficial and uncontroversial aspect of teachers’ working lives, the research highlights a number of (largely unrecognized) aspects of the Facebook group that did appear to constitute disadvantaging, exploitative and/or disempowering forms of digital labor. In these terms, the findings highlight tensions between what appears to ‘work’ for individual teachers in the short-term and likely longer-term implications that these practices might have for diminished professionalism and expertise of teaching publics.
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| 10. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Teachers 'liking' their work? Exploring the realities of teacher Facebook groups
- 2018
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Ingår i: British Educational Research Journal. - : Wiley. - 0141-1926 .- 1469-3518. ; 44:2, s. 230-250
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Social media are now an important aspect of the professional lives of school teachers. This paper explores the growing use of mass 'teacher groups' and 'teacher communities' on social media platforms such as Facebook. While these online communities are often welcomed as a means of professional learning and support, the paper considers the extent to which Facebook groups also expose teachers to some of the less beneficial aspects of social media, such as various forms of 'digital labour', commercialisation of exchanges and predominance of individualised reputation-driven behaviours. Drawing on a detailed examination of a Swedish teacher Facebook group of over 13,000 members, the paper first addresses aspects of the online community that could be seen as professionally beneficial and/or valuable-particularly in terms of information exchange and social support. Yet while perceived by participants as a relatively beneficial and uncontroversial aspect of their working lives, the research also points to characteristics of the Facebook group that constituted disadvantaging, exploitative and/or disempowering forms of technological engagement. In these terms, the paper highlights tensions between what appears to 'work' for individual teachers in the short term and likely longer-term implications that these practices might have for diminished professionalism and expertise of teachers.
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