Mediatized Teachers-Students Interactions: How Mobile Social Networks Modify Pedagogical Contact

Abstract

This paper is inspired by work on a doctoral thesis ''Transformation of intersubjectivity in mediatized higher education'' (EHU, Lithuania), where the implementation of social networks in education is treated as one of the cases of a broader process of mediatization. To analyze the transformation of intersubjective interaction in the mediatized pedagogical process, phenomenological optics is used. In contrast to research that treats ''student experience'' as ''user experience'' that is open to manipulation, measurement, and optimization (Ginzburg, 2011), the phenomenological approach considers it as a subject-subject interaction and the event of coexistence in pedagogical contact (Friesen and Hug, 2009; Friesen 2011). Thus, the paper substantiates the relevance of phenomenological optics for searching for answers to the following questions: how does the use of mobile social networks transform the intersubjective interactions of teachers and students?; how does this implementation modify pedagogical contact?; what are the consequences for the whole pedagogical process? Application to phenomenological methodology and conducting hermeneutic interviews are proposed as ways to get answers to these questions.