The social distancing and lockdown measures enacted to address the COVID-19 pandemic entailed an unprecedented shift to digitally-mediated communication. The move to remote learning at schools was one of such important changes. Drawing on privacy and STS literature, we investigate the role of different privacy cultures during the initial moment of…

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought challenges to the educational system on micro, meso or macro levels. In this article, we posit that the current emergency augmented, what we call the meso space, while at the same time representing a sort of magnifying glass to observe and examine how distance education tools, practices and new forms of…

Much of the research on how social media is embedded into the educational practices of higher education students has a Western orientation. In concentrating on a case study of the varied ways in which African International Distance Education (IDE) students actively use social media to shape their learning experiences, we discuss an…

The use of digital tools like computers and tablets in institutional learning arenas give rise to forms of flexibility where time and space boundaries become diffuse. Online learning sites are understood as being crucial today, especially in large parts of the Global North, where anyone anywhere potentially can become a student and have access to…

This article presents results from a longitudinal survey of first-year students' time spent on living and learning technologies at university, their frequency of using specific learning technologies and their competence with these tools. Data were analysed from two similar surveys at the start and at the end of the academic year for students…

Since the early years of the twenty-first century there has been an increasing interest in using Web 2.0 technologies to support learning in Higher Education. However, previous research suggests that the integration of blogging into courses can be difficult and cites problems with issues such as student compliance. We adopt a learner-centred…

Much previous research into the effectiveness of CMC has suffered from a lack of clarity or of consistency in the adoption and explication of coding typologies or taxonomies. This has reduced the opportunities for comparison between studies and for the accumulation of evidences to guide pedagogy. In addition, most studies of CMC have used…