Technological partnership in everyday life: exploring the user-identities of postgraduate students in technology-related courses

Thesis

This study is guided by the underlying assumption that learning takes place through mediated processes. More particularly, learning is facilitated by the tools we use in everyday life. The rise of digital technology has led to new ways of examining and understanding learning as it occurs in both everyday life and across the life course. How one interacts with digital technology is likely to influence one’s learning across different domains of life from school to work to leisure.

This dissertation explores the concept of the ‘user-identity’ to examine the ways individuals interact and make use of digital technology in their everyday lives. User-identities can be conceptualized through the ‘digital mindsets’ individuals hold towards digital technology, as these in turn shape the ‘technological partnerships’ they exercise in everyday life. In understanding the identities of individuals as users of digital technology, I argue, we may better understand the ways they learn with these technologies through everyday activities and processes with digital technology.

Using this innovative theoretical concept, I explore the user-identities of 18 postgraduate students in technology-related courses through semi-structured interviews. User-identities expressed by participants demonstrate that these were significantly influenced by their educational and occupational pathways, where digital technology were likely to play a formal part of their learning. The study also suggests that user-identities are shaped over time across an individual’s wider learning life with digital technology and these develop across trajectories (education and occupational), identities (everyday users and specialists), and contexts (informal and formal) for learning and using digital technology.

With the increasing number of affordances in everyday life, users are given more flexibility and freedom over their technological activities. New ways of examining individual interactions with digital technology must be developed, as these now shape not only learning outcomes but also other life chances. I end with a recommendation of user-identities as an analytic concept for future learning and technology research. Such a concept may also be relevant in other fields such as new media research and digital sociology.

Authors: Zubiri, D

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-noabvrdoe
• Type of award: MSc
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: MScEducation; L&T; L&T2018
• Subjects: Learning; Education