Creating Time: Students, Technologies and Temporal Practices in Higher Education

Abstract

The nature of time has been considered in some depth within philosophy and social theory, while theoreticians have also explored interrelationships between temporality, artefacts and social process. However, the notion of time in mainstream educational theory and research has arguably been regarded as fixed, naturalised, undifferentiated ‘context’, and has tended to escape examination or problematisation in the learning technology literature. However, as the contemporary university becomes increasingly permeated by digital mediation both online and ‘face-to-face’, relationships between digital media, time and socially situated practices of meaning-making are foregrounded. This article will report on a UK-based research project which investigated postgraduate students' day-to-day engagements with technologies, drawing on a combination of qualitative focus group, interview and multimodal journaling. The data suggest that for these students the dimension of time is in complex, dynamic and contingent interplay with a range of networked devices and shifting material domains and practices, which are mobilised for textual engagement and production. It will argue that student entanglements with devices and digitally mediated texts serve to pause, distribute, elongate and render simultaneous the temporal nature of their practices in emergent ‘temporal practices' in complex relationships of co-agency with devices and technologies. It will conclude that a typological analysis is inadequate to understanding these complex, emergent engagements.