ENSEMBLE

A promising frame for guiding both project planning, data collection and analysis is provided by actor-network theory (ANT). ANT avoids thinking about ‘context as container’, instead reconstructing context as a set of relational connections, which are performed. It goes further by tracing associations between different actants, which include humans (users, developers, researchers and others), physical artefacts (e.g. visualisations, search and navigation tools) and theoretical and semiotic entities (e.g. learning outcomes, cases, and assessments), which are associated in textured relationships (networks). In ANT terms, the occasional stabilisations of networks produce and embody rules of engagement and rituals, ways of thinking and understanding, and materialisations in technology and language practices. What is, of course, of interest to the project is the role of technologies, data sources and the cases around which learning is based: as actants, stabilisations and inscriptions.

ANT offers a language for observing, tracing and reassembling the ‘ebbs and flows’ and uncertainties of groups, facts, actions and understandings. For example, visualisations of complex information sets can be understood as inscription devices for engaging with a multiplicity of ways of understanding information and constructing new knowledge. Learning outcomes can be understood as a black box which is treated as a ‘fact’ where such closure suggest certainties that put aside contradictions and complexities which are otherwise problematic. Fluidity then becomes a way of paying attention to ‘ebbs and flows’, so for example what is complex may be simplified and later resurface as a different type of complexity. The Semantic Web, as a response to such fluidity, offers the possibility for users to “craft and play with different and alternative versions of reality”, making the technology itself a mode of discovery and a set of tools for making and knowing new realities.

Such an interdisciplinary undertaking requires a theoretical framing of relevance to practitioners, social scientists and information/computer scientists as well as integrating with prior work on case based learning. Furthermore, ANT has also been applied in the course of studies of changes in teaching and learning practices and in the use of technologies in various forms of work, as these are configured, tailored, combined, adapted and mobilised in ways beyond those originally envisaged. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has been used to explore and demystify how and why the relationships between learning, technologies, and knowledge may be fragile and powerful, brittle and enduring, fluid and stable, and provides us with a powerful and ‘fit-to-purpose’ set of research approaches.