The internet, like many communication technologies before, has been described as both democratizing and oppressive. Celebrants have emphasized the Internet’s capacity for supporting new forms of collaboration, democratic participation, and community (e.g. Shirky, 2008, 2010). By contrast, skeptics have highlighted ways that the Internet may limit knowledge sharing and generation (e.g. Pariser, 2012). McChesney (2013) argued that celebrants and skeptics of the Internet present radically different perspectives, both with significant merits yet flawed by a lack of ‘political economic context’ (p. 13). We argue that platforms simultaneous empower and disenfrancise their users, and propose that personal websites can shift this balance in individuals' favour.
The Internet’s transformation away from personal websites and toward platforms has many positive effects: Notably it is easier than ever for many individuals to instantly communicate with masses of others. The rise of ‘Web 2.0’ in the mid-2000s broadened the Internet’s reach as platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and others made it accessible for individuals to produce and share content online. The business model supporting this participation is predicated on platforms’ capacities to aggregate and commodify users’ participation (Cohen, 2013), for example by “set[ting] inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use in the application” (O’Reilly, 2005, p. 5). Whereas barriers for online participation have lowered, this has generally been accomplished in ways that empower platform operators most of all.
One of the most effective design patterns for platforms has been to streamline or automate decision-making, so as to make it easier and faster for users to write, share, and interact with Web content. A key example of this strategy is the rise of algorithmic news feeds, which prioritize or diminish content based on automated decisions whose logic is rarely apparent to users (Eslami et al., 2015). Similarly, the proliferation of simple, predetermined interactions—e.g. likes, shares, retweets—across platforms and throughout the Web encourages frequent interactions which can be commodified as platform-ready data (Helmond, 2015).
This sort of streamlining makes the Internet more accessible by reducing the requirement and ability to make decisions about how and where to seek, respond to, and share knowledge. Many of the technical and other tasks required to maintain an online social world are simplified into a series of steps — scroll through a newsfeed, click 'like', write a reply — and this encourages individuals to use the internet in a way that generates commodifiable data for platform operators. Users enter a transactional relationship (Jarvis) where they provide data in exchange for ease of use.
Franklin's (2004) concepts of holistic and prescriptive technologies are useful for evaluating the democraticising power the web may have. Holistic technologies are those that support craft-like approaches where the wielder of a tool retains control of their process including decision-making and planning. Franklin, a deep critic of technology noted how prescriptive technologies limit our choice and freedom under illusion of convienence Much like a writer can shape their writers notebook based their whims someonce can do the same from their own domain.
In constract, prescriptive technologies enact a division of labour between planning and execuion by reconstituting one large job as a series of small steps. A key consequence of prescriptive designs is that they “eliminate the occasions for decision-making and judgement in general and especially for the making of principled decisions” because “any goal of the technology is incorporated a priori in the design and is not negotiable” (Franklin, 2004, p. 18). While we rejoice at how online platforms have lowered barriers to online participation, this has come at the expense of opportunities for the sort of principled decision-making we want to instill in our students.
As educators we must shape the spaces of learning to meet ideals of democratic education (Dewey 1934). For Dewey democracy is a way of being, of experiencing the best collective action humans could muster. The same is true of the web. When we examine learnign as something to be managed through an LMS we do not provide students with the experience of building online networks necessary for knowledge brokering (cite).
Community matters in the construction knowledge and therefore in building the web. Dewey (1927) noted, ‘[a] Great Community can only occur with free and full intercommunication’ (p. 211). In terms of fighting fake news and wrestling back control from powerful search engine and social media compnaies, we must build a shared experience around common goals with elements of experimentation and criticality (Bruce & Bishop, 2008). Such community inquiry allows people to construct knowledge from both the personal and the collective (Shore et al., 1996).
We take a research activist perspective that engaing in democratic educaton requires us to utlitize holositic technolgoies to build community in the classroom. More importantly we believe moving our classrooms on to the web and into the open, will allow learners to share and reflect on how they develop knowledge.
The strongest of learning occurs around a shared goal (Lave & Wagner), and often the instutions of education may interfere with learning (Illich). Therefore we seek to study networked spaces where communities gather around a shared goal as community of practice. Additionally, legitimacy in such communities is achieved in part by adopting a common naturalization of the space's tools and artefacts, i.e. implicitly using those tools for similar purposes and with similar methods as fellow community-members (Bowker & Star, 2000). For this reason, holistic tools that afford critical interpretation and decision-making can contribute to communities that embody those values. These affinity spaces (Gee) often emerge organically and the learners who often fail in formal settings thrive.
Dewey (1934) noted that thinking occurs in "forked road situations" where we are presented with problems and must work through proposed alternatives. Dewey argued that through training we can transform learners’ natural capacities to project future outcomes into the habits of critical inquiry. To this end DFewey stressed the importance of reflection and on the connection of art and meaning.
When we only relign on prescriptive technologies we limit the number of decision making when curating communities and growing the knowledge of students. Students are nto afforded the opportunity to reflect on design. They have fewer needs to.
These thoughts and experiences are culturally mediated and involve practices and tools developed throughout our literate histories (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). The concentration of corporate power on the web creates a monoculture that threatens non-dominant narratives as users conform to one design aesthetic or, worse, get run off the web by actors more effective at network technologies.
Therefore we belive the best uses of technology for learning require greater user agency over the environment and the people whom make up our networks. Thus we examine learning as a brokering of knowledge (cite) in utlizing both people and networked technlogies.
Literacy and langauge have always intertwined with society. Halliday's exploration of language (1978) requires us to acknowledge how the web gets shaped by sociotechincal systems (Huges).
... acknowledge that the Web is not simply a technical system distinct from the social contexts into which it is deployed. Instead, just like every tool for literacy before it, the Web is a sociotechnical infrastructure whose components include its users, builders, maintainers, and other stakeholders (Hughes, 1987).
As a sociotechnical system this envokes issues of power (Focault).
When functioning smoothly, such infrastructures tend to fade into the background, obfuscating their constituent parts, historical trajectory, and the fierce debates that have shaped their influence upon the social order (Star, 1999, Sandvig, 2013). Prescriptive designs enhance the seamlessness of such systems, and in so doing reduce opportunities for contesting or choosing their future direction. From the perspective of users who are discouraged from considering how the design might be different, such technologies achieve a sense of closure (Pinch & Bijker, 1987).
Latour's (2004) distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern can help consider this issue. Latour identifies matters of fact as those features of the world we perceive as stable and beyond our control, and matters of concern as things that exist in flux and demand critique and engagement to shape their futures. When technologies present limited options for their use, they are likely to be taken as matters of fact, since they appear beyond the influence of most individuals. Forms of engagement with technology that simultaneously promote critical inquiry and technical fluency can encourage turning the relationship between technology and society into a matter of concern (e.g. Ratto, 2001).
For the past thirty years we have looked at the sociotechincal system of the web as a technology issue and not a literacy issue (Leu, 2015). This has lead to educators utlizing presecriptive, rather than holistic technologies to manage the web. This in turn further reduces the ability of students to read, write, and participate on the web as they do not touch the material langauge, HTML, used on the web.
Simply put the way we teach the web today would be like requiring students to read a book without learning to write a web. We are asking people to become writers but providijng them with tools they can not shape and with pages already half filled. We believe a better way forward is to provide all learners with a space online to shape their own truths and netowrks.
We believe best way to support an open web is to encourage, and specifically design sociotechnical systems for our students to learn from a website they control. This in turn may improve their digital literacy skills while also allowing students to exert considerable agency, while we increase their potential to shape the internet more broadly.
The shaping of these spaces for democratic education requires us to consider the shape of learning in these spaces.
As a theoretical lens we apply the concept of Affinity Spaces to surface charactertstics of learning spaces we shoudl apply to classrooms using web technologies. James Paul Gee built off the work of Communities of Practice. He chose affinity spaces to delineate from physically defined communities. Instead groups, offline, online or both, gather around a shared goal (2004).
In these spaces of and for learning a learner apprentice's more with the community rather than a specific teacher (2004). Learning occurs through joint action where we pair with more advanced peers around our indiviudal goals but united by our shared goal. Gee makes the disntinction between communities of practice aroudn the concepts of space. We learn in these socistechnical systems as much from the space as we do from any indvidual learner.
We utilized Gees's affinity spaces as a lens to investigate learnign on the web from a Deweyian perspective. Gee outline 11 princiles of affinitiy spaces for our analysis we operationalizes these theoretical into four overarching themes: goals, organizational structure, content creation and knowledge brokering.
Given the theoretical underpinnings that we must help to build a better web and our belief that the spaces of learning matter more than indiviudal students and educators we both actively participate in these communities. Furthermore as community engaged scholars we conduct research as praxis. We seek to understand how things could be, rather than are they are or where they are.
Therefore readers must recognize that our description of the pedagogies that emerge from these communities could be impacted by our involvement or close personal relationships. We do not try to account for this bias in our analysis but rather embrace it in conclusions we draw from the data.
The data are as independent from our bias as possible. This is a preliminary case study designed to identify variables of interest that can be used in follow up studies. To reduce bias in the data collection and analysis we utlized multiple sources and then triangulated this with community checks.