Student Engagement in the Digital University: Sociomaterial Assemblages

Digital literacies, the student experience, and student engagement are issues justifiably receiving a great deal of attention in fluid and fragile higher education at present. Relevant, pressing, and important issues-why read more about them? Because this book provides a perspective out of the ordinary, refusing to simplify complex issues or homogenise students who indeed are diverse and differentiated. Providing an understanding that is inherently political and contextualised, and using real examples of embedded student practices, Gourlay and Oliver deconstruct current buzz words (such as impact, quality, infrastructure, and the like) and reconstruct them in ways that use theory to illuminate and explain. They provide persuasive arguments to articulate the digitally mediated relationships between students, the resources they use, and the situations in which they find themselves learning and negotiating the world. Recommended for scholars and professionals alike.

-Laura Czerniewicz, Director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, University of Cape Town, South Africa

This book is a wake-up call for both researchers and practitioners in educational technology. Our field is much more complex and multi-dimensional than our dominant models of communication, community, institution, and theories of change and diffusion would have us believe. Gourlay and Oliver eloquently show how digital artefacts, agencies, and forms of engagement constitute an intensely interlinked, closely contested space, casting our everyday engagements in radically new light.

-Norm Friesen, Professor of Educational Technology, Boise State University, USA