Andrew Whitworth

• The University of Manchester

The digitisation of society produces a need to foster new skills and competencies in learners. But where digital and information literacy competencies are addressed in higher education (HE), this is typically in ways that orient the learner to practices expected in the academic setting, or what Lloyd (2010) calls the “epistemic modality”. However,...

Cambridge Core - Communications, Information Theory and Security - Mapping Information Landscapes - by Andrew Whitworth

This chapter reports on a study of two cohorts on a postgraduate course in educational technology. Networked learners work in groups of 5–6 to complete a series of complex learning tasks that require them to build and steward a ‘digital habitat’ (Wenger et al.: Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities. Portland, CPSquare, 2009): a co...

A study is conducted of twenty groups, of 5-7 learners each, who are studying on a postgraduate course unit oriented toward development of professional practice in the field of educational technology. On the unit, students are assessed through their contributions to online discussion boards in which their groups are engaged in learning tasks that i...

Informed learning (Bruce, 2008) is a pedagogic framework that aims to enable students to use information to learn through the experience of variation in the relational frame. The research described in this paper comes from a larger project called Stewarding and Power In Digital Educational Resources (SPIDER) and we describe how the mixing of campus...

A research project considered how groups make collective judgments about information in workplaces, employing a mapping methodology that raised judgments into collective awareness and ‘talked them into being’ as representations on a map. Recordings of conversations held during mapping sessions reveal the role of facilitation, and how facilitators a...

abstract: Two academic libraries undergoing significant organizational changes were the location for a project that researched how staff members and subunits of the libraries made collective judgments, negotiated what is sometimes called the “landscape of practice”—the collective body of knowledge of their profession—and thus came to collective und...

The collective management of informational resources, or the “information landscape”, within two workplace settings is investigated through a methodology based on facilitated concept mapping sessions using a non-digital tool. Mapping raises information literacy practice – the ongoing, critical judgments about information, made within these communit...

Visualization and mapping techniques can build a dynamic picture of information practices, including action research, within libraries, raising awareness of how the information landscape at each library may both support and retard research into the library's information practices. These techniques have implications for researchers as they generate...

This short paper reports on the first two phases of the Bibliotek i Endring (BiE) or “Changing Libraries” project. This project addresses a gap in the literature in that organisational change in academic libraries has not previously been studied from perspectives which emphasise practices and networked learning. The first phases of the project gath...

What would a synthetic theory of Digital, Media and Information Literacy (DMIL) look like? Radical Information Literacy presents, for the first time, a theory of DMIL that synthesises the diversity of perspectives and positions on DMIL, both in the classroom and the workplace, and within the informal learning processes of society. This title is bas...

Informational resources are essential for communities, rooting them in their own history, helping them learn and solve problems, giving them a voice in decisionmaking and so on. For digital inclusion - and inclusion in the informational and democratic processes of society more generally - it is essential that communities retain the skills, awarenes...

This paper investigates a ‘grand’ educational technology innovation through theoretical lenses inspired by Cervero and Wilson’s (1994, 1998) work. Through taking this approach it is possible to show how ideas about the form of the innovation and perceptions of its ultimate ‘success’ or ‘failure’, varied between stakeholder groups. The project was p...

The shift in perception, from librarians as providers of information to librarians as educators in the effective use of information, requires the profession to become aware of differing approaches to the development of teaching and of the professional consciousness of educators: also of the way certain forms of teaching and CPD are privileged over...

Information stored in non-formal educational institutions such as museums can be perceived as a resource for local communities, who may perceive and interpret the information in ways that differ from classification systems in use by curators. These perceptions may be collected and disseminated by Web 2.0 technologies and social media, a process whi...

This article reports on a qualitative content analysis of a sample of national information literacy policies, whether endorsed by states or professional bodies. It develops a framework for analysis which is attuned to the idea that information literacy can and should be viewed from multiple perspectives; this being the "six frames of information li...

This chapter extends a resource-based analysis of politics, or 'geopolitics', into the sphere of information, producing a perspective that has been called 'noöpolitics'. Control over information's production, accessibility, dissemination and even meaning are conduits for the transmission of cultural hegemony, and noöpolitics also sheds light on how...

This paper reports on a project funded by the HEA-ICS, which sought to create an open educational resource to help develop media and information literacy skills in postgraduate research students. The resource uses a distinctive and holistic approach to the teaching of these subjects, which brings together Bruce et al's 'Six Frames of Information Li...

to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than t...

In this chapter the authors present the concept of Learner-Generated Contexts as a potential framework through which the more effective use of technology to support learning might be supported and engendered. In particular, they concentrate on the theoretical grounding for consideration of LearnerGenerated Contexts as a context-based model and orga...

An exploration of information literacy and ICT skills education from the point of view of social and political theory. The author incorporates theories to argue why the idea of information literacy is so important in the 21st century, and also to develop teaching strategies to this end. The book argues that only through expanding the range of infor...

Wahlstedt and co-workers are making efforts to determine the cause of why e-learning environments need to be 'places' instead of 'spaces'. They define 'learning space' as a technological construct made of 'tools and structures' for learning development, while 'place' is a function of social interaction. Their work is aimed to change the design proc...

Activity theory (AT) is a powerful tool for investigating ‘artefacts in use’, ie, the ways technologies interrelate with their local context. AT reveals the interfaces between e-learning at the macro- (strategy, policy, ‘campus-wide’ solutions) and the micro-organisational levels (everyday working practice, iterative change, individual adaptation)....

The British Journal of Educational Technology's (BJET) special issue on an introduction to the ways the common modes of organization within higher education institutions (HEI) impact upon the development of e-learning are discussed. HEIs are subject to external environmental influences such as government policy, variations in the market for their c...

This paper presents results from a qualitative inquiry into how online courses in UK and US HEIs are shaped by stakeholder negotiations around course management systems. The investigation used a multi-theory framework composed of Cervero and Wilson's (1994) negotiation of power and interests model and activity theory. Forty-six stakeholders from se...

The rapid increase in the variety and availability of resources and tools that enable people to easily create and publish their own materials as well as to access those created by others extends the capacity for learning context creation beyond teachers, academics, designers and policy makers. It also challenges our existing pedagogies. In this pap...

This paper develops a critical methodology which could be applied to the study and use of e-learning environments. The foundations are, first, an ontological appreciation of environments as multiple, dynamic and interactive: this is based on the environmental theories of Vladimir Vernadsky. The next step is then into epistemology, and here use is m...

Insights developed from critical social science, particularly the work of Jürgen Habermas, are used to analyse the development of information literacy as a subject and its contemporary definitions. The challenges facing information literacy educators are located in potential contradictions between the subject’s strategic, technical elements and its...

The necessity to view innovations in educational technologies with the major role played by organizational politics to promote higher education is discussed. An innovation or change in natural, cultural, commercial, political, and technological will impact upon the organization. E-learning is becoming an increasingly integrated part of both the cul...

Course deign in any discipline should emerge from an interaction between the lecturers’ motivations and justifications for teaching, the learning environment, and students’ diverse needs and desires. In ICT all of these are to an extent controlled by the prevalence of standardised “packages” of training, but because of a lack of uniformity in web d...

Decision making processes within environmental social movement organizations are analysed with reference to principles derived from the communicative rationality of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas can provide normative grounds for consensual decision making, and analytical tools by which one can judge existing practices. The radical environmental organiz...

IT education has become a key skill for higher education students, but the teaching of this subject is often ineffective. Office-related, “button-pushing” skills are passed onto students via standardised packages with little regard for context and individual needs. Attempts to use IT to foster more critical and foundational faculties are lacking. T...

The theories of Jürgen Habermas provide us with a powerful analytical tool for the analysis of politics, including social movements. However, they are lacking in one particular area, the analysis of environmental politics. The reasons behind these difficulties can be traced through the development of Habermas's work and lie in the inability of non-...

Review of literature on corporate portals, whose main purpose is to provide easy access to enterprise digital information. Corporate portals use metadata and eXtensible Markup Language to integrate unstructured data to structured data from enterprise ...

The communicative reason of Jürgen Habermas potentially provides normative standards for emancipatory political practice. However, attempts to apply these standards to environmentalism founder on the difficulties encountered in including non-speaking entities such as animals in Habermas's language-based framework. Eckersley has attempted to resolve...

MOSI-ALONG is a project which investigates how formal and non-formal educational institutions can use social networking and media to help communities learn about, and thus nurture, online informational resources. It brings the curatorial and content creation expertise of a range of formal, informal and non-formal educational providers, which we ter...

This poster describes a research project which aims at enhancing the resource generation networks within universities, vis-a-vis the dissemination of e-learning innovations, a task which many universities find difficult as it is rendered problematic by the general, 'loosely coupled' structure of universities. This is exacerbated even further by the...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Leeds (Department of Politics), 2001.