Session 4: Affect and how people experience and respond to change by David Barton
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Transcript of Session 4: Affect and how people experience and respond to change by David Barton
Affect: How people experience andrespond to change
in the digital environment
Presented by David Barton
LONDON JAN 2017
Activity:
• What annoys you about your work?
• What annoys you about technology?
• Does this involve writing?
• Are you stressed?
How are digital communications technologies shaping academics’
writing practices?
• Including differences across universities, and disciplines and individual academics – History, Marketing and Maths.
Changes over time
• 2009 Exploratory study: Interviews with 9 academics in social sciences and humanities,
• Pre-impact agenda in England, and fewer changes in academics’ lives
We found:
• Very wide range of types of writing.
• People mentioned the role of technologies extensively
• People had strong likes and hates
Transformations in tools and resourcesin the academic workplace
– Virtual learning environments (VLEs)
– File sharing and other tools for collaborative work
– Online library resources
– Smartphones and portable devices
– Social media, and everyday software
Every aspect of academic practice is changing
Wide range of digital tools and platforms used in writing
• Diane S: Writes in Word; uses Skype often and screenshares documents; uses shared Dropbox for version control.
• Gareth W: writes using Word and LaTeX, sending documents back and forth using LaTeX which his student compiles, uses email, but not VLE much
• Rebecca A: digital camera revolutionised collection of archive material; but still likes to hand write notes about manuscripts
Affect and ‘Stance-taking’
• Stance-taking in sociolinguistics and discourse refers to:
– 'taking up a position with respect to the form or the content of one's utterance'(Jaffe, 2009, p.3)
• Major kinds of stance: – Epistemic (e.g. I believe English is better…)
– Affective (e.g. I like DropBox because…)etc.
Affect: Likes and hates
• Charles C: “I hate Skype. […] I find it’s a simplistic thing, the dislocation between eye contact..”
– Prefers meeting face to face, spending the day with people, having coffee breaks and dividing work tasks.
Different paths to common goals:The example of Powerpoint
1. ‘I prefer Prezi.’ v ‘Prezi’ makes me vomit.’
2. ‘PowerPoint… for images not texts.’
3. ‘…make it sound as if it wasn’t being read.’
4. ‘my foundation point for a lecture used to be a text, now it’s a PowerPoint.’
5. ‘…then we look at it together over Skype and sort of change whilst we’re discussing it.’
Negative affect:The ‘always-on’ problem
• Implicit expectation of being constantly in contact using digital devices
• Extension of responsibilities to students
• Including blended learning for on-campus students
‘Always-on’
–Rebecca A: “We’re expected to be on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
–Diane S: “It’s like every time you sit down to do some writing, an email comes in that takes you away from it.”
–Charles C: “…the last thing I do at night is check my emails. The first thing I do in the morning is check my emails.”
Positive affect: Collaboration facilitated by digital tools
• Diane S pleased with large international collaborative research bid, 13 universities in 6 countries, writing crucial.
Bid depended on combination of distant collaboration facilitated by both digital tools, and face to face meetings and happened very quickly
Conflicted Stance
• ‘I love Twitter… I hate Twitter…’
• ‘I like…’
• ‘I like…. but…’
New technologies:
- Encourage new forms of collaboration
- Encourage the mobile scholar
- Reflect individual histories
- Need to be discussed in the context of other social changes.
- Reflect other online issues