Research Article Open Access

Education into the online world: On the appropriation of online text and the production of everyday knowledge

Abstract

Most people alive today have learned to use technology not in classrooms, but rather from each other in day-to-day settings as new devices and software continuously transform what it means to "learn about technology." Kleifgen and Kinzer (2009) have called for research into education “with and through" technology that does not prejudge what is to be learned or who is to teach it. This paper follows everyday moments of instruction about technology in blog comment threads, where bloggers identify that some commenters are "ignorant" of how to use blogs, search engines, and other new technologies. Through these conversations, we see that education outside of institutions, rather than being a transfer of old information from experts to novices, is a process of negotiating what there is to be known, how it is to be known -- what a new social order is, in fact, to look like. This has implications not just for technology learning, but for education as a whole.

Gillian Andrews and Hervé Varenne

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