ABSTRACT

As personal digital devices have become increasingly embedded in schools, what they do tends to silently fall into the background and generally be taken for granted. In order to scrutinize the silent doings of digital devices, this paper explores how attending to breakdowns as a methodological heuristic device can be an insightful entry point to surface and analyze these doings. By conducting a sociomaterial ethnographic study in one Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) school, this paper disentangles four different breakdowns that occurred during the ethnographic study. The analysis reveals a particular mode of digital doings at school, coined as digital pedagogics, that characterizes the school space–time as plastic and poly-synchronous and curates lesson activities. Moreover, this mode is heavily conditioned by and through the school’s sociomaterial infrastructure. The paper concludes that in the wake of the breakdowns, the school’s infrastructure comes into being not merely as a bundle of cables and basic structures that make the school function, but more importantly as a complex configuration of clouds, software and interfaces, algorithms and patterns, standards, protocols and negotiations. This sets the condition for framing contemporary digitized schools within a particular techno-scholastic milieu.

摘要

随着个人数字设备越来越多地嵌入学校，它们的行为往往会悄悄地落入背景，并且通常被视为理所当然。为了检查数字设备的无声操作，本文探讨了如何将故障作为一种方法学启发式设备来介绍和分析这些操作是有见地的切入点。通过在一所自带设备（BYOD）学校中进行的社会材料人种学研究，本文阐明了在人种学研究期间发生的四种不同的故障。该分析揭示了学校中一种特殊的数字活动模式，称为数字教学法，它把学校的时空表征为可塑性和多同步性，并策划课程活动。此外，这种模式在很大程度上取决于学校的社会材料基础设施。该论文得出的结论是，在发生故障之后，学校的基础设施不仅仅是作为使学校运转的一堆电缆和基本结构形成的，更重要的是作为云，软件和接口，算法和模式的复杂配置，标准，协议和谈判。这为在特定的技术学校环境中构建当代数字化学校奠定了条件。协议和谈判。这为在特定的技术学校环境中构建当代数字化学校奠定了条件。协议和谈判。这为在特定的技术学校环境中构建当代数字化学校奠定了条件。