A recording of this webinar is now available via the ALT Repository.

This webinar presents a view of digital literacy through a discussion of E-learning and Digital Cultures (known as EDCMOOC), a Massive Open Online Course offered in January 2013 by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with Coursera. The profusion of multimodal artefacts produced in response to the EDCMOOC will provide a number of examples with which to explore sociomaterialism in relation to literacy practices online. It will be suggested that this work constitutes a set of sociomaterial entanglements, in which human beings and technologies each play a part. By looking at these examples, we will suggest that sociomaterial multimodality offers a different way of thinking about digital literacy: not as a set of representational practices, but rather as complex enactments of knowledge, specific to particular contexts and moments.

About the presenters

Jeremy Knox is a PhD student at the Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh and a tutor on the MSc in Digital Education. He is also a member of the ?E-learning and Digital Cultures? MOOC teaching team. His research concerns relationships between critical posthumanism, new materialism and the open education movement.

Sian Bayne is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Edinburgh, and Director of Studies on the Edinburgh MSc in Digital Education. My research interests revolve around educational change as we become more and more enmeshed with the digital. Current particular interests are around posthumanism and online education, the geographies of distance education, museum learning and multimodal academic literacies. I’m currently Associate Dean (digital scholarship) in the College of Humanities and Social Science at Edinburgh.

About the series

This seminar series is funded by the JISC IOE Digital Literacy project, and will be hosted by ALT. It will explore the themes of the forthcoming special issue of Research in Learning Technology, which will focus on Digital Literacies and Digital Scholarship. The authors of four of the papers in the special issue will present on their research and theoretical perspectives surrounding these themes.  The series will be curated by Lesley Gourlay (joint editor of RLT) and Special Issue guest editors Martin Oliver and Norm Friesen. Sessions will involve presentation, exploration of themes by the facilitators and open discussion with participants.

The webinar will be run using Blackboard Collaborate 11. We will notify you of arrangements approximately three days prior to the webinar, giving you time to get your PC or Mac set up and tested, taking account of the guidance on the ALT web site at http://www.alt.ac.uk/events/webinar-faqs.