 So I'm Caroline Kuhn and I'm a PhD student at BASPA University. I'm writing OPS my last year. I'm a part-time student. And I'm presenting, I guess, less the process of my research, but more the theoretical aspect of it that I found out quite at the late stage of my research. I'm part of the Gojiya network, and that's the Tukopamoja here, which is an amazing network of people that come together every year. And so I'm part of that. And I'm grateful for all what I have learned from them. So I'll start with sharing the context and the problem very quickly, my research question, and what did I did as an exploratory phase, my methodology, my findings, and some preliminary conclusions. So talking about the context of my study, these deterministic views of young people being digital natives I think is very dangerous, particularly for universities that assume that as we don't need to do anything because they already know everything. So that was a problem for me. And that deterministic views tend to then ask the question of what works, efficiency, where can we perform faster? And I think that the problematization of the use of technology on the ground is missing under those questions. And the messy present is avoided in some sense. Deterministic views at the same time, they tend to do this black boxing around technology. So when the airplane crashes, then we look at what happened. And I think we should be looking at the very beginning of the process instead at the very end. And the potential of the technologies are very, very often missed or misunderstood by practice. And it's very different. So if a technology has a potential to do something, it doesn't mean that some student will be able to accomplish that. And I think that that is really important to be aware of. And students' view of looking at students as disembodied learners is a thing that you take them out of the context and the power relations in which they are embedded, they disappear in a way. And I think that is also dangerous. This is part of a bigger context. It's a study that the Joint Research Center did in 2008. And they were envisioning this intensive learning society putting open learning at the core and center of what everyone does every time and everywhere. And I was just kind of asking myself, well, that's great. But where are students in this picture? And I think, doing a lot of research, that voice was and still is unexplored. And I was very interested in that voice of students and how are they managing this kind of space where they are considered they don't need any help because they're very native. So the literature then said, at the time I started this because I'm a part-time student. So I started this in 2015. So at the time I started, JISC was doing the Digital Student Project, which was a very, very productive project. And these things were part of that study. And then another study done at Oxford University about students wanted to do their own blend and they wanted to find their tools and mix and play around and tinker around. But they didn't know how those digital tools would help them to support their studies. And then in our university, I chaired a conference that was student-led and it was about exploring the different graduate attributes, which is how the UK measures in a way their vision. And so digitally literate was one of them. And many students came and basically they said that they wanted to know more about what digital literacies are or is, if we say literacy, and they would like to be taught consequently. So they were very dissatisfied. And then in a lecture hall with 187 students, I asked them what's digital literacies and that's the overwhelming answer. But then very funnily, I asked, OK, those who said, yes, could you please put a definition there? And it was mainly jokes. So I guess that a lot of them just didn't know at the time what digital literacies is. And I think there is this saying, name it and then tame it. And I think that is really, really important if we talk about digital literacies. Then I did using the survey that Gisk used in their digital student project. And I explored which are the tools they used and how they engage with different things very quantitatively. And you can see the results here. And that was also for me quite. I thought, well, aren't they digital natives? There's tons of properties and features and stuff. But I was really asking, I don't think that is really so. And so I decided then to stop the time and say, wait, I'm going to look at the daily entanglements of students' use of digital tools and platforms on the ground and what was happening in the space with them. So I set up two research questions. One was how, why, and to what extent do students engage with tools? Open or not, but open, I'll explain why are in brackets, on platforms and in informal settings. And how do they make sense of the environment where these engagements happen? I used, at the very beginning, constructive grounded theory as my methodology. I had 20 students that I interviewed. I used, so I organized focus group. I used the visitor and resident approach, which is this kind of canvas where they paint, you will see in a bit how they engage and with which tools. And it's kind of a continuum that you can place yourself in each of the spaces. This is one of the maps. And she was, I think, 20 at the time. And she was saying that she felt she was the forgotten generation, that no one has done anything for her, in relation with digital literacy. This is another map where we can see how the personal space is quite populated, whereas if we see the academic space, they only have. And really, if you see there, the tools that are there are just these already given tools by the university. So this is the virtual learning environment that my university uses. So I was kind of looking at, why is this happening and how can I look at this data? What can I do with it? How can I look at these maps? What can I say about them? So I went to Cape Town two years ago with 12GN, who is my extended family, I would say. And there we were, all of them. And we worked a lot and we did a lot of debating. And there I came across Cheryl Hodgkinson-William, and she introduced me into critical realism, and realist social theory. And so I understood this is really what I will use to look at my data. So what it does, it has a deep ontology, a stratified ontology, which means that social reality exists out there independently of us knowing about it. So reality is more than what I can see. And so that social reality is layered. And you have an empirical level, which is this visible level that you can perceive through your senses. But then you have a real level, which is the deep level where these generative mechanisms that are within structures, they are located there. But then there is this middle level where these generative mechanisms that are in the deepest level, when they are enacted, when they are active, then they generate these events that we then see at the empirical level. And I thought that was really a good meta theory to think about my data. And so what they say basically is that the empirical gives us an avenue to the real, which is this deep level, but only when the former is guided by theory. So the goal of science is the theoretical identifications of things and their causal powers. I don't have time to get into how this is not deterministic, but I have read extensively in my PhD why this is not deterministic. Basically, because social reality is conceived as an open system that is complex and emergent. So there is nothing like determination there. And so I refined my questions, thinking about what are these social conditions that are constraining students' agency as causal powers for their open digital practices. And so when I analyzed my data, I got into the empirical level using constructive grounded theory, but I then went deeper looking at the maps. And this is a topography from a geographer, but what I did is the maps I had, I started to draw some topographic ideas on them and thinking about what makes those arrangements of the features, in this case, not mountains and river, but tools, what makes these arrangements as they are? Why are they so different? And at the real level, I started to see which are the mechanisms that are in place in my sample. And I just want to say, I have a very small sample, 20 students, which I'm not intending to do any generalization here. I'm just pointing to a particular problem that I do think, and I have also done the research in my PhD, that there are different studies that are more quantitative and bigger sample that point basically to some similar findings. So here we can say things that they have said, so I'm scared, I don't understand where my stuff is, the cloud, what's the cloud, where is my stuff there in the cloud, can I? So kind of all expressions of things that they were felt afraid of and anxious. So what I concluded in a way is that emotions, like fear, anxiety, uneasiness, overwhelming feelings tell us that this formal digital space is a space of struggle and emotions following critical realism is a mechanism. It's real and it generates inaction or action, in this case it is inaction what it has led. The technological infrastructures as well, they are a mechanism and they constrain because it's a new language, new rules, new problems, new threats, and that is something that one needs to take into account. And on the other hand, students have approaches to learning that are different, but basically the majority has a surface approach to learning, which doesn't allow them to dig deeper into new tools, explore and find out how to do new things. And on the other hand, in particular, I think higher education and Kate was really her talk couldn't be more excellent for my own position. The institutional culture is really a difficulty. I think that technology opens up the door, so they're great, a lot of technology, but at the very end, there are no resources and no time to find out how can we embed that in our practice. So policy is missing and the culture really, I think, is doesn't allow that to happen, at least in my institution. So I think this kind of idea of a space being an empty vessel where you put your tools and stuff is misleading and it's very dangerous, and I think one needs to be very aware of that. And instead, I think we need to think about spaces as dynamic, co-constructed and participatory. And if we see spaces as becoming through interaction with the context, and the context being filled with people and with people that are present, but maybe people that are virtually present, we would make a better job, I think. And spaces, I consider they should be as emergent because it is an open system and so all of that complexity comes in and they emerge through that interaction and they are becoming, because becoming for me is the aim of education more than skills and anything else. So I just have been doing a lot of research in relation with the sociological understanding of space and how I have drawn from human geography and critical social theory to do an analogy with what geography and space talks about and how virtual spaces have been under theorized or under, I think, described, I think it's under theorized. So this quote tells us, and this is about social theory around space, that natural space becomes a social phenomenon or social space once people begin to use it. Boundaries are put on it and meanings, including ownership, which I think is key for us, are attached to it. Then the air over dirt becomes a lot or a plot and if residential users obtain control over the bounded space, then it becomes a place. And I think that is one of the things we, yeah, I think is a good thing to be aware of when we are creating the spaces for our students. And this is the work of Soja, Edward Soja, who really is a very dense and very good sociologist about space and it's the same thing. We should think about space not as passive, not as this euclidean understanding more filled with action and meaning. And meaning is key in my research at least, how a space is meaningful and how that then alters, how that space is enacted and how that space is then populated with the tools. And so I have been thinking now about how can we think about this further? How can we create something different? And topology, which is the strands of mathematics that thinks about properties of spaces that stay invariant. So I have thought about the topology of learning spaces and looking at which are these properties that are unaffected for open learning spaces. And these are seven duplettes, how I call them. And my work is a work that is inspired by lots of people. The Gojian, Catherine Cronin, Wendy Liu, who is a really good critical mind around technology, or the whole open movement. And so yeah, I think I finished. I'm not sure where I'm going next. I'm open to any question, any suggestion, any different interpretation, any different views on what I have done. And thank you very much for your time and attention. I have put, I'll put this up and there are a lot of references for you whoever is interested. So there are some slides on it.