Table Of ContentVirtual Sites
as Learning Spaces
Critical Issues on
Languaging Research in
Changing Eduscapes
Edited by
Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta
Giulia Messina Dahlberg
Ylva Lindberg
Virtual Sites as Learning Spaces
“Virtual Sites as Learning Spaces is a fascinating and well-timed volume, unique
in the combination of a social science and humanity perspective on learning in
the virtual, and in how it allows a radical rupture with old frameworks on learn-
ing, language and identity, triggering the reader to imagine entirely new ones.”
—Mariëtte de Haan, Professor of Intercultural Education,
Utrecht University, Netherlands, and co-editor
of Media and Migration—Learning in a Globalized World (2016)
“As distinctions between online and offline contexts become increasingly
blurred, our understandings of education and communication need refinement.
This volume tackles a range of important questions about the multifaceted
nature of language, literacies and learning across a range of digital-analogue con-
texts—from Facebook to Wikipedia. It is an empirically-rich and theoretically-
varied addition to the critical literature on technology and education.”
—Neil Selwyn, Monash University, Australia, and
author of Is Technology Good for Education? (2016)
“The authors provide the reader with effective examples and a generative analyti-
cal framework to acknowledge the continuum and the permeability between
apparent current dichotomies such as digital-analogue. In a brilliant way educa-
tors are introduced to the frames and the norms that have been developing in
relation to the ways different technologies are linked, used and interpreted by
humans. A must-read for those interested in the connection between education
and the evolving techno-scape.”
—Alessio Surian, University of Padova, Italy
Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta
Giulia Messina Dahlberg • Ylva Lindberg
Editors
Virtual Sites as
Learning Spaces
Critical Issues on Languaging Research
in Changing Eduscapes
Editors
Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta Giulia Messina Dahlberg
School of Education and Communication Department of Education and
Jönköping University Special Education
Jönköping, Sweden University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden
Ylva Lindberg
School of Education and Communication
Jönköping University
Jönköping, Sweden
ISBN 978-3-030-26928-9 ISBN 978-3-030-26929-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26929-6
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
The chapters “Inscriptions and Digitalization Initiatives Across Time in the Nation-State of Sweden: The
Relevance of Shifts and Continuities in Policy Accounts for Teachers’ Work”, “The Story Event “The
Beauty and the Beast” in Second Life: Literature Studies and the (Non-)Adoption of Virtual Worlds”,
““Oh It Was a Woman! Had I Known I Would Have Reacted Otherwise!”: Developing Digital Methods
to Switch Identity-Related Properties in Order to Reveal Linguistic Stereotyping” and “Handling
Languaging During Empirical Research: Ethnography as Action in and Across Time and Physical-Virtual
Sites” are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the
chapters.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans-
mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
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the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
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claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Foreword
Over a decade ago, I began the “Wired Up” project with two colleagues
in The Netherlands (Mariette de Haan and Sandra Ponzanesi, both of
Utrecht University). The purpose of Wired Up was to research how
migrant youth used new technologies and media, and how their uses
related to their experiences of migration. It was through the course of
that work in Europe that I became acquainted with Sangeeta Bagga-
Gupta and Giulia Messina Dahlberg, with their research group CCD
(Communication, Culture, and Diversity), and with other scholars doing
important work in related areas across northern Europe. Bagga-Gupta
and Messina Dalhberg made a significant contribution to a special
themed issue of Learning, Media, and Technology, edited by the Wired Up
team. The moment seemed ripe—we had produced one of the very first
edited journal issues out on learning, new media, and migration. About
a year after that publication, Bagga-Gupta and Messina Dahlberg hosted
the “Virtual Sites for Languaging Spaces” (ViLS-2) meeting in Örebro,
Sweden, which I was enthusiastic to attend, and at which I met the third
editor of the present volume, Ylva Lindberg, and became aware of her
fascinating work on these issues as well.
But beyond the fortunate background of people meeting people
around shared interests and commitments—a kind of affinity group—
what really brings the Wired Up project to my mind in relation to this
collection is the ambitious reach across the social sciences and humanities
v
vi Foreword
that is present herein. While the field has been stewing on these approaches
and co-locating them (sometimes in integrated ways, sometimes as forms
of parallel play), this edited collection expands and sketches new futures
across research questions and their multifaceted approaches. These trans-
disciplinary movements across social science and humanities can be cap-
tured, somewhat, in the multiple meanings of the expression “virtual
sites,” the leading terms of the collection’s title. From a social science
perspective, a “virtual site” may be associated with digital mediation itself,
as contributing to something like an environment, social space, or ecol-
ogy for learning. Here, the meaning of “virtual sites” can play with the
other-worldliness of the digital realm, and the associated and complex
ideas of how various “sites” for learning and identity are produced, are
bounded or unbounded, are created by practices and structures, and are
associated with power relations. The problem, the social scientist might
say, is an updated version of the old “cyberspace” problem—if virtual
sites are not entirely different spaces, then just what are they?
In this volume, a humanities perspective also speaks to these issues, and
here with a unique and powerful focus on language. Work in digital com-
munication often has either little or only indirect focus on language itself,
yet in this volume the meaning of “virtual sites” extends into other trajec-
tories through explorations of languaging, text, genre, fiction, and related
issues. What comes to life about virtuality in these language explorations
is that the virtual is not opposite or apart from the real; rather, the virtual
is always entangled with the ideas of realization or actualization (Farman
2013). The virtual layers and multiplies the real: nonfiction/fiction, per-
son/character, event/plot, and representation/imagination are always
implicated in one another. Of course, entanglements of the real and the
virtual are true for social science as well, but especially through language
the imaginative power of what could be, and how such becomings are tied
up with modal possibilities that stretch beyond the word, becomes pow-
erfully present in the work. Looking closely at language/ing—in “virtual
sites,” and moreover, as a site of virtuality—is the tapestry that this work
weaves with/in the expansive and complex versions of life that have
emerged through new forms of media, learning, and communication.
In a transdisciplinary mode, then, scholars and researchers should read
this volume to reconsider and develop a more expansive view of learning.
Foreword vii
In virtual sites? Of course, but where is there not a virtual site any longer?
It was once said that our latest technologies have always functioned as a
metaphor for our latest models of thinking or of the brain. Greek water
technology, for instance, led to the four humors, and how they must be
kept in balance. By the eighteenth century, the flows of fluids (e.g., water
clocks) and mechanisms were used as metaphors for movements in the
brain (Brooks 2014). Much later the computer functioned in these ways
as a metaphor for thought (e.g., cognitive processing theory, parallel dis-
tributed processing) and later still the Internet (distributed cognition,
networked learning). So, what about learning? How do new technologies
and practices shape our imagination, methods, and metaphors for illumi-
nating learning?
Social learning theorists like to repeat that learning is “situated.” From
a social learning perspective, when we more seriously engage with under-
standing learning outside the individual, our ideas of “learning” will then
always reflect our latest notion of “situation” or “site” as well. This volume
pushes open the idea of situation and should be read with that goal—and
gift—in view. If learning is situated, then just where is it situated? How
are situations made? The situations for learning provided by earlier situ-
ated learning theorists—primarily localized contexts of observable action,
and many involving some kind of material craft knowledge—created
new theory for learning but simply no longer relate well to the full com-
plexities of our distributed lives. The movement from situation to virtual
sites indexed in this volume is complicated and troublesome, yet also full
of hope in an expansive human capacity to create new situations and
simultaneously “find” ourselves within them.
Along with “situation,” then, what we find recast in this volume is the
notion of “participation” in learning; for social learning theorists, the
book offers a more dynamic and productive engine through which to
conceive of participation as not merely being located “in” situations, but
as producing social spaces through which learning happens, in all of its
particularity. Much of this work happens through a focus on language,
and the possibilities that language scholars have discussed for some time
to not only be referential to some context, but to be contextually produc-
tive as well (e.g., Duranti & Goodwin, 1992). As such, the chapters in
the volume explore the policy document as a kind of virtual site, knowl-
viii Foreword
edge promotion (and demotion) in Wikipedia as a language process, and
how bots interact together with humans in the process of editing. The
chapters also explore how virtual learning sites creatively change linguis-
tic and cultural norms of interaction, and how multi-modal resources are
deployed in the design of a mobile language learning app. Pedagogy in/
with virtual sites is re-inspired, for example by an analysis of how an
expansive text universe (far beyond an individual literary work) functions
as a text-world, and another detailed sociolinguistic pedagogy into modes
of stereotyping. Other chapters specifically attend to problems of
method—including a fascinating piece on using literary methods to
explore online interactions in a virtual world.
Thus, the chapters can and should be read as individual investigations
and world-stirrings concerning researching virtual sites of learning, each
turning the objects of our assumptions concerning learning (e.g., the
situation, participation, language, the individual) around in new ways for
critical conversation. All the same, and in keeping with the leanings of
the volume toward multiplicity and complexity, and toward the interplay
of languaging, the work is best read as a kind of palimpsest. Individual
studies and chapters overlay one another, directly and indirectly posing
significant questions to the reader: What is learning and how is language
active in it? How is learning produced in the here-and-now and the not-
yet? How are learning possibilities cut off or controlled? None of these or
other big questions can be addressed by a single piece, nor could they be
modeled. Rather, it is through their relation to one another—the dia-
logues and movements between them—that we come to new under-
standings as well as new questions. No longer can scholars and students
of learning conceive of social practice as playing chess on a single game
board—capturing all the visible moves of the players. Rather, we must
look at and through the multiple surfaces of different chess “boards”
stacked atop one another. We must look and engage level by level, move
by move, utterance by utterance, and see how the pieces, material and
semiotic, engage in new forms of worldmaking even as they produce new
kinds of learners.
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA Kevin M. Leander
Foreword ix
References
Brooks, R. A. (2014). What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?
Computational Metaphor. Edge. Retrieved May 19, 2019, from https://www.
edge.org/response-detail/25336
Duranti, A., & Goodwin, C. (Eds.). (1992). Rethinking Context: Language as an
Interactive Phenomenon (Vol. 11). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Farman, J. (2013). Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media.
New York: Routledge.
Preface
There is little in the “connected knowledge society” that is not being
shaped by digitalization or being envisaged as changing (not uncom-
monly for the better) by digitalization. Such ideas and visions notwith-
standing, the continuing disparity in human existence, and the magical
promise of digitalization, points towards a paradox and calls attention to
the role of scholarship in creating a body of knowledge that is theoreti-
cally and empirically framed, rather than normatively framed. This vol-
ume thus attempts to unpack dimensions related to the type of research
endeavours that continue to remain at the periphery.
While the Gutenberg press revolutionized issues of access in funda-
mental ways, the relegation, and even redundancy, of the printing press
and the physical text into second place in the aftermath of digitalization
has (re)opened the promise of new avenues of access, inclusion and
democracy in ways that were, if not unthinkable, the stuff of science fic-
tion only a generation ago. Where someone is, how and when people
meet, and what such meetings offer in terms of positionality, (non)access,
opportunities and learning constitute some questions that disrupt
assumptions in a number of hegemonic frameworks in the social, human-
istic and educational sciences. Such disruptions not only create analytical
and methodological dissonance in mainstream scholarship, they also
emerge as challenges for scientific enquiry by taking on board the very
theoretical and methodological implications of such disruptions. The
xi
