Assumptions and theoretical framing

Our investigation is underpinned by key assumptions which include that access is a “thick” concept which must be understood as extending beyond technological resources;

that the resources that need to be accessed are interrelated;

that ICT use needs to be understood in relation to its purpose; and that specific media forms (both ICT and non-ICT) are associated with particular teaching and learning events.

As it became evident that the project offered an opportunity to do more than collect baseline data, we began to develop a more refined and informed understanding of access to ICTs for teaching and learning in the South African higher education context. Our motivation was primarily to develop an analytical model which could be used as the basis of our empirical investigation. While we were able to draw on an established international theorist, (Laurillard 2002), for usefully explaining ICT use for teaching and learning, we

did not find a ready-made model of access which suited our purposes in the local context. And despite important enthusiastic national policy support for access to ICTs, we found little local research to help us name and frame access to ICTs in higher education.

On the basis of our readings and of the results of a pilot study survey with staff and students, we refined, polished and redeveloped four key areas until we agreed on four categories of resources to form the analytical foundation of our study. That we would need some kind of dualist distinction between macro and micro, or structure and agency, was unavoidable. Mindful that this is hotly contested and deeply theorised terrain, we acknowledge that structure and agency are interdependent (Freeman 2001) and interpenetrated (Lehman 2003), and that they presuppose each other (Giddens 1979). We therefore suggest four categories of resources: technological resources, resources of personal agency, contextual resources and online content resources.

Overall, we take a relational view (Van Dijk and Hacker 2003b) in order to map networks, conditions, positions and connections. While mapping relationships between resources requires distinctly bracketed resource groupings, in our view, resources are not static or absolute; they are not binarily present or absent. Because they can be available to varying degrees, we needed to track frequency and ease of access as well as availability of resources.

In the section of this report about access we explain our access categories in more detail. A summary of our

framework is provided in Table 1.1; our analytical framework in turn informs the specific research questions.

As many others have done before us, we argue that ICTs have no intrinsic benefits in themselves, but are most usefully understood as interwoven in practices which exist in specific contexts and for particular purposes (Snyder 1998; Kling 2000; Warschauer 2002; Warschauer 2003a;

2003b; 2003c; Lamb and Johnston 2004). Our focus is on the connections which exist between ICTs and teaching and learning events. This approach means that, unlike many other related studies (Collis, Peters and Pals 2001;

Norris, Sullivan and Poirot 2003), our primary interest is not to quantify use of a particular software or functionality (although we do need to know the extent of use), but to emphasise ICTs as “functional ensembles”, that is to consider the ways in which ICTs are accessed, as well as the link between people and ICT uses, as opposed to a view of ICTs as a collection of features (Sawyer and Crowston 2004).

This study does not evaluate the use of particular ICTs in relation to one another nor to other technologies, as do others, such as Mason 1998; Collis, Peters et al. 2001;

Cantoni, Cellario and Porta 2004. Rather, we note that particular ICTs are more likely to be used for particular events. While the studies of use which categorise types and levels of courses have been useful in contextualising the extent and nature of ICT use, they do not focus on teaching and learning interactions (Mason 1998; Bonk, Cummings, Hara, Fischler and Lee 2000). We therefore recognise that our study is bounded by the curriculum, and that the

Table 1.1: Conceptual framework: resources for access

Technology Personal agency Contextual Digital content

Physical Practical Social Institutional

Definition Tangible

macro level of the course and the micro level of pedagogical interactions frame the investigation.

Understanding ICT use at the level of pedagogical engagement will provide valuable insights into their relationship with teaching and learning. Pedagogy is about the various forms of interaction between three agents:

teacher, student/s and knowledge domain. These three agents comprise three elements in a triangle of interaction (Garrison and Anderson 2002). Pedagogy is not only about both process and content, but also about context.

Discussing technology and pedagogy requires consideration of the interrelations between teaching approaches, learning experiences, the nature of the content under discussion and

the knowledge being created (Lusted 1986; Bernstein 2001;

Loveless, DeVoogd and Bohlin 2001).

Teaching and learning interactions and activities are likely to be linked with specific forms of technology. In order to be able to describe the relationship between pedagogy and technology we looked for a framework that could describe teaching and learning interactions, link them to purpose (allowing us to contextualise them), name types of ICT use, categorise types of ICT forms, and explicitly link them to particular teaching and learning events.

This is a challenge which has been taken up by researchers who have developed theories focusing on one of those

Table 1.2: Conceptual framework: teaching and learning events, teaching strategies, learning experiences and educational media

Teaching

Lecture notes online, streaming videos of lectures, DVD, multimedia including digital video, audio clips and animations Discovery Create or set

up or find or or Web resources including hypertext, enhanced hypermedia, multimedia resources.

Also information gateways Dialogue Set up, frame,

moderate, lead,

Practice Model Experimenting, practising,

Drill and practice, tutorial programmes, simulations, virtual environments Creation Facilitate Articulating,

experimenting,

Simple existing tools, as well as especially created programmable software

Source: Adapted from Laurillard’s Rethinking university teaching (2002)

elements (for example Johnson and Aragon 2003). A comprehensive holistic approach is offered by activity theorists, who provide a way of describing the whole learning environment, including linking social, cultural and historical influences, and examining relationships between people and new technologies (Ravenscroft 2001; Issroff and Scanlon 2002; Mwanza and Engestrom 2003). Lim has specifically proposed using activity theory to examine elements of ICT use within an academic course but like the others does not offer an explicit way of describing the kinds of ICT use for teaching and learning, nor models of ICT media forms (Lim 2002). The only model we found which explicitly links specific ways of using ICTs to pedagogy is the conversational framework developed by Laurillard (2002) and used and extended by others (Britain and Liber 2004;

Conole, Dyke, Oliver and Seale 2004). This framework classifies different types of media forms in relation to key teaching and learning events in a way that makes it possible to link them to specific teaching strategies and learning experiences.

In the section about use for teaching and learning we explain how we adapted Laurillard’s (2002) conversational framework, which provides a way of describing teaching and learning in terms of five key events: acquisition, discovery, dialogue, practice and creation. These events involve specific teaching strategies, roles or actions which interact with specific learning strategies, roles, actions and experiences.

The framework then links five media forms with the key teaching and learning events. Together they describe the most dominant learning experiences and teaching strategies currently employed in higher education. An overview of this framework is provided in Table 1.2; it too informs our specific research questions.

We conceptualise access to and use of ICTs as a virtual Möbius strip. A Möbius strip is only one-sided and has no beginning or end. It has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. This image captures the relationship between access to and use of ICTs as they are inherently related, beyond being linked or cyclical. If one has access to ICTs, one has a use of ICTs, and as one uses ICTs, one in turn requires more or different access. It is a cycle that can start at any point and never ends. The two concepts are forever locked together in a never-ending path and one cannot separate them out.