"Practices, skills, and knowledge in a digital age"
Ylva Lindberg, Professor and Associate Dean of Research in School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University
Abstract: Research in educational technology is a steadily growing multi-disciplinary field wherein different strands and foci are becoming increasingly difficult to disentangle and identify in isolation. For example, educational technology's initial focus on implementation of tools for teaching and learning seems to have progressively shifted towards a contextual concern, where analogue-digital social practices are foregrounded with tools becoming a dimension of the practices. The shift towards "doing with tools" (Bagga-Gupta et al. 2019) in formal-informal settings are reshaping our understanding of "practices", "skills", and "knowledge". This raises questions regarding how scholars and practitioners make sense of these concepts, as separate terms or domains and in different activities, as well as how the relationships between these concepts are conceived.
The problem is addressed in this presentation by a bibliographic approach that takes its point of departure in the flow of books on educational technology published in 2019. The dataset is narrowed down to focus on three publications authored and/or edited by scholars who are members of the international networked based research group CCD - Communication, Culture and Diversity (ju.se/ccd), situated at the School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University in Sweden. The aim is to bring these publications into dialogue regarding the broader thematic topic of "practices, skills, and knowledge" in a digital age. The recent CCD volume: Virtual sites as learning spaces. Critical issues on languaging research in changing eduscapes (Bagga-Gupta, Messina-Dahlberg & Lindberg eds. 2019) serves as a point of reference.