Paper i gave at the #nlc2012 conference in Maastricht

1. Informal networked learning:
A network in the wild
Ailsa Haxell
ailsa.haxell@aut.ac.nz
amusingspace.blogspot.com

2. • Learning is something that happens naturally, incidentally,
pervasively and situated within everyday life. (Fox, 2002)
• Yet most studies involve institutionalized formal education
settings privileging knowledge of networked learning that
involves particular groups of people, and the ways such
people relate.
• This risks effacing the fascinating mangling of context that
generates particular practices that do not fit the picture of
formal educational settings.
Fenwick and Edwards (2010) and with acknowledgement to Pickering (1993)
Learning

3. Networks
Tomas Saraceno,
Galaxies Forming along Filaments
Venice Biennale, 2009.
Photo by Bruno Latour (2011)
Networks, Societies, Spheres:
Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist
Networks in the wild
“It’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them
from above or up at them from below, or from left to right,
try it you’ll see that everything changes” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)
Reuters image, cited by
David Weinberger
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archi
ve/12/01/to-know-but-not-understand-david-
weinberger-on-science-and-big-
data/250820/#comment-400769949

4. On becoming textually active with
youth counselling
• Shadowing of work of counselling in progress
• Participant observation
• Interviews: of those providing and making use of the service
• Analysis of artefacts: 6400 text messages
• Ethics … the risks of sensitive research … the risks of not having research

5. In the middle
of things:
The Christmas
gift

10. • What happens when practice and emergent
technologies collide?
• What happens where the borders on
innovation and of literacy practices are less
firm?

11. • Tensions hold a
thing (practice) in
shape
• anchored to things,
human and
otherwise.
Cheap texting
Seductive
advertising
A Christmas gift:
Corporate social
responsibility
Funding bodies
Media representations of texting
Voluntary
counsellors
Young people
Txt capable cell phones
To do no harm / to do good

12. • Technology is not a passive carrier
• Young people are not passive recipients
• Counsellors do not move in untroubled ways
between platforms
• And counselling does not stay the same
All the relationships require
renegotiating and different
dynamics emerge.
What “distributed agency” means for practice:

13. Dynamics of emergent practice
Adapted from Latour (1987) Dynamics of science, and
Latour and Sloterdijk (2009) Networks and spheres

14. A hopeful monster gets born
“I said “I think they might also be called ‘hopeful
monsters’.”
She said “What are hopeful monsters?”
I said “They are things born perhaps slightly before
their time; when its not known if the environment is
quite ready for them.”
Nicolas Mosley
Cited by John Law, 1991

15. What happens at the borders of
innovation & literacy practices?
“the contours of agency (human and otherwise) are
mangled in practice...
delineated in the emergence of resistance and
accommodation”
(adapted from Pickering, 1993)
Altering
• Who gets to define whom
• Who leads and who follows

16. Resistance and Accommodation
• “It’s a little bit of a worry [text counselling] because if they
are young you don't know, so you can be responding as if
the person was well into their teens when they might be ten
or eleven and might be sounding very natural and affirming
of sexual activity assuming they’re old enough to do that
but colluding with activity that’s not really appropriate for
age.
If they sounded young on the phones, we would have
probably found a way of asking that. So what’s texted back
is more cautious because if you’ve got a ten year old saying
my boyfriend wants to have sex with me that’s very
different to an eighteen year old.”

17. Resistance and Accommodation
• 20% of those texting in became annoyed with the
responses
– I jst wanna txt coz I dnt wana b heard
– Can u plz jst txt me s0 I d0nt feel al0ne
– Il neva b abl 2 talk bwt it.S0ri 4 bthrn u
– Im sori I dnt thnk I cn cal.i jst feel 2 stupid
– Kn I js txt im a byt shy n da fne
– No I wana txt! Im crying u wont b able 2 understnd me
– If I effing wanted to call I effing would have!
– Icnt call im in the sck bay at skewl
– Calls dnt wk from here
– Im def n dum jus txt me PLZ
– If my dad hears me Ill get a hiding. JUS TXT

18. Resistance and Accommodation
Digital traces of dissatisfaction also leads to
unsettled counsellors:
• “I hate apologizing all the time. I do lots of
apologizing. That gets me a lot.”

19. As the performance grooves or patterns are laid
down and are repeated, they provide a template
for what can come next
(Bigum & Rowan, 2004)
This research runs interference on such patterns
being laid down, drawing attention to the
relationships involved and the qualities of those
relationships.

20. This matters because relationships are deeply
constitutive. Relationships not only shape
practice, but shape us, and the realities of our
lives, and this matters because some people’s
realities are difficult enough without being
made worse.

21. An attribution error is made when agency is
located individually.
e.g. thumb generation,
foolish, trivial, damaging
emotionally avoidant,
developmentally delayed
nomophobia… zombiism
Denying agency as distributed pathologizes young
people, and creates barriers to “working with”.

22. • Change occurs not only because new actors
appear, but also because the relationships
themselves change.
• Interrupting the previous paths and grooves laid
down includes levering multiplicity and seeing
ourselves as implicated rather than detached.
• Such relationships / Our relationships
can also be otherwise.

23. I/we
(4 we will nevR b jus 1 agAn)
hOp 2 hav dn justice
4 a hopeful monstr.
N trublng disMpowRing
constructns of agenC
I/we hOp 2 hav disruptd
a$umshns of powerle$ne$.
I/we hav demonstr8ed
ontological poltics @ play.
I/we rAz such m@rs az reals
- situ8d & local
n sure knowldg
th@ things might also alwAs
b othrYz. 

24. Hi not relly sure
bot this, but my dad
died and jst not 2
sur bout thngs
every1 seems 2 hav
it 2getha and im a reck Sounds like ur
gng thru a prty tuff
time at the momnt.
Might b easier to
Talk than txt?Nah jus wanna txt
Talking would make
it too real. And
I jus wanna take it slo

25. Seems evry1else
has it 2getha and I
cant stop crying..
Snds stupid I kno
Its ok 2 cry n be
sad.
Ppl r all different
wif way they react 2
things.