Three themes emerged from the analysis. Firstly, the students constructed the interactive app as being an awkward fit within a lecture context. The students dominantly saw the ideal lecture as an opportunity to engage in didactic learning (Brown & Race,
2014; Covill,
2011), which led them to direct their attention towards note-taking, and subsequently construct the interactive app as unfitting for the context. Secondly, the students constructed the app as being an ‘uncomfortable’ risk to their social subjectivties. Students recognised technology users as occupying ‘marked’ (Brekhus,
2007) social subjectivities that were conspicuously uncomfortable and socially risky. They therefore widely constructed the interactive app as somewhat uncomfortable to use. Thirdly, the students constructed the app as a threat to their sense of themselves as ‘good’ academic subjects. Many students saw the app as going against their academic sensibilities, seeing it as an unprofessional and distracting device.
Unfitting: interactives apps as unsuitable for a lecture context
A key pedagogical rationale for our introduction of the interactive app within lectures was to engender a shift from passive to (inter)active learning. Our motivation to introduce technology is consistent with a compelling amount of educational technology iterature that highlights the potential of educational technologies for supporting social- and cognitive- constructivist learning (Jonassen & Reeves,
1996; Oliver,
2002; Woo & Reeves,
2007). While we positioned the use of the online space as offering a new and beneficial learning approach, many students were less convinced, appearing to favour a traditional lecture approach. As Covill (
2011, p. 98) warns, educators’ assumptions about learning in lectures may not match student experiences:
Professors who advise students that they are going to switch to a method that will increase students’ engagement and deepen their learning is likely to be met with confusion by students who already believe they are getting these benefits from traditional lectures
Consistent with Covill’s (
2011) study, many of the students also responded with discomfort and resistance to the interactive app in the lectures. Here, the students saw the lecture as an “island of meaning” (Zerubavel,
1997, p. 11). The lecture was a concept dominantly understood as having a distinctive cultural value and meaning that was not going to be easily changed. For example, several students discussed what they wanted out of lectures:
In the lectures I want to get knowledge. It’s information for my assignments that I want. In the seminars we can then talk about it, but in the lectures I want to just be told what I need to know. [Focus Group 1]
In the lectures I just want more information about the subject. But I hope to gain more in-depth knowledge from the seminars so I can speak to the tutor about anything I am concerned about. It is different from the lecture, I just want to get, like, the new information [in the lecture] [Focus Group 2]
In another group, the students rallied around one particular comment about how the app interfered with the traditional notion of the lecture:
I don’t prefer using the app in the lectures. I prefer being told things instead of you doing it yourself. [Focus Group 5]
To this comment, her peers responded enthusiastically:
Yeah, I do as well.
Yeah, I prefer someone just speaking at me giving me factual information. [Focus Group 5]
Similarly, Focus Group 6 started out their discussion emphasising that they value getting “information from friends” and “group work” [Focus Group 6] in seminars, but quickly shut down the suggestion that the interactive app could help facilitate similar learning situations in lectures. This was not the sort of learning that they ideally wanted for the lecture experience:
But in lectures It’s a hassle isn’t it
You only have ten minutes to set up
Yeah, I prefer just old school teaching
[…]
Wouldn’t you do [interactive learning] in a seminar, though?
Yeah, it’s better in a seminar than a lecture.
It’s just better. [Focus Group 6]
Here, it appears that many students believe that they may learn well through interactive tasks involving active knowledge construction but are nonetheless reluctant to redefine their learning role within lectures. It is ironic that these students reported using technology as a hassle, given the extent to which students can go out of their way to use their mobile phones for social purposes during class time (Wallace,
2011). Nonetheless, the theme of technology getting in the way of their idealised view of the lecture was sustained in multiple focus groups.
We contend that there is a broad
socio-cultural factor at play in this scenario. The concept of the lecture is a longstanding “island of meaning” (Zerubavel,
1997, p. 11) that is well sedimented in academic and cultural discourse (Brown & Race,
2014; Di Leonardi,
2007; Wilson & Korn,
2007). The lecture is not only a pedagogical activity, then, but also a cultural one. It is something students
anticipate, and that often induces thrill in students who have looked forward to the experience of this ‘grown up learning’ for several years prior to making it to university. Sitting in a lecture receiving information from the ‘sage on the stage’ is an image that exists in popular culture and remains dominant across educational institutions (Covill,
2011). It also exists as an image of prestige designed to lure students on university prospectuses and websites (Drew,
2013). Thus, introducing the interactive app in a way that subverts this image was met with resistance from students who can see cultural as well as pedagogical value in the didactic lecture.
Given the continued dominance of this traditional construction of the lecture across courses at universities, a lone course in which an interactive app is introduced to disrupt this model may do little to subvert the dominant model (Gikas & Grant,
2013). Again following Covill (
2011, p. 98), we see that:
…it would be highly difficult for a professor to sustain an active approach in an institution where the lecture method prevails. Imagine trying to convince students that a particular teaching method is superior when all of the other professors that these students have appear to be contentedly using an “inferior” method. To be working against the predominant culture, is not realistic.
Furthermore, the notion that listening to an educator lecture while students take notes is not necessarily perceived by students to be passive per se (Covill,
2011; Wilson & Korn,
2007). Indeed, students could be very active sorting, organising and classifying
in their minds without necessarily needing to physically interact with their environments. This approach is highlighted, for example, in the literature on multimedia design, which emphasises the role of lecture slides in signalling, directing and segmenting information in order to support lecture participants’ active internalisation of data (Mayer,
2009; Moreno & Mayer,
2007). In other words, these Piagetian
lone scientist students appeared to find non-interactive lecture presentations valuable for developing their mental schemata, and were uncomfortable with their lecturer unsettling this through the introduction of the interactive app.
Furthermore, there is a challenge in using educational technologies to build upon or supplement a traditional approach. We focused in this study on how to integrate an app into a traditional on-campus course structure. Here, we provided a lecture
with an educational app. As others have argued (Pedro et al.,
2018) there is a risk here in assuming that a technology can be augmented into a traditional classroom in a way that does not disturb its overall ecosystem. Perhaps, there is a need to approach app integration in a way that does not merely supplement traditional education, but rather develops an educational ecosystem in which the app is integral to how learning takes place. As Author 1 has argued elsewhere (2017), the placement of technologies in supplemental roles creates a situation in which educators and students use technologies for augmenting traditional learning, rather than wholesale re-considering how learning might take place. This is, indeed, all the more relevant given that the very app that we selected for this study – Collaborate Ultra – is designed primarily for lectures to take place remotely, not in-person.
Thus, successful integration of educational technologies is significantly more difficult than simply introducing opportunities for (inter)active mobile learning. We contend that educational technologists and educators must acknowledge that a challenge for introducing educational technologies exists within cultural discourse itself (Chan et al.,
2015; Covill,
2011). Solitary attempts to introduce an interactive app and reconstruct the pedagogical concept embedded in the notion of ‘the lecture’ ignore the fact that there exist pre-conceived ideas and legitimate student desires about what
should be involved in a lecture, and what students
want to be taking place during this time. Students, therefore, tended to construct the interactive app as
unfitting for their idealised notions of the lecture, and rejected it on those grounds.
Uncomfortable: the interactive app as a risk to social status
A second salient theme that emerged out of the interviews was students’ constructions of the app as being
uncomfortable. Students had social anxieties about having their questions and responses publicly visible to peers. Many therefore resisted using the technologies out of a fear of having their responses scrutinised by both lecturer and peers. In social media studies, the user who is reluctant to make their presence visible is labelled the ‘lurker’ (Dennen,
2008; Preece, Nonnecke, & Andrews,
2004). A lurker might browse through the social media space, but resists contributing due to factors including shyness, desire for privacy, fear of aggressive respondents, and lack of interest (Preece et al.,
2004). Similarly, in our study, students consistently highlighted the social risks of posting. This discussion emerged in all eight focus group interviews.
We argue that what was emergent during these discussions was students’ concerns about what Brekhus (
2007,
1998) labels ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ subjectivities. A marked subjectivity is one that is set apart, and therefore made more conspicuous than safer, and privileged, unmarked subjectivities. Following Brekhus, students saw the educational technology users as being marked subjects. They became members of the cohort who stood out as being
different and
abnormal. This difference was widely seen as an undesirable trait because it carried with it certain social risks:
You feel like you are on your own when you are told to get on [the app …]. Also, when people answer the name comes up [on the lecture screen] and they don’t want to be wrong. I feel like some people don’t want their name put up there so it wouldn’t matter what they say [Focus Group 8]
People laugh at you if you do the activities where you write on the screen. [Focus Group 7]
Similarly, Focus Group 8 discussed what they saw to be jostling to appear ‘cool’ and ‘aloof’ taking place within the lecture theatre:
You know when you are in school and you have the cool kids and then they take the mick out of other people? Whatever workplace you are at you have people that are really popular and people that are not in most schools and whatever…
…Like, some think they are too cool to use the app…
…Yeah. To do it is like something the geeks want to do, and things like that [Focus Group 8]
Focus Group 1 corroborated these claims:
You know you’re not the only person doing it. Like, I hate being the first person to like answer one of the questions, because…
…Oh nah I don’t like that…
…It’s like, oh she’s a nerd. [Focus Group 1]
Avoiding using the interactive app altogether, or being a silent technology ‘lurker’, is therefore seen as a socially safe activity. Returning to Brekhus, we can see here that “the ‘marked’ holds far more social weight than the ‘unmarked’ in identity attribution” (Brekhus, Brunsma, Platts, & Dua,
2010, pp. 64–65). Here, then, there are high-stakes consequences for using the app. Socially, students may find themselves as losing – or failing to gain – social capital as a result of being marked as ‘losers’, ‘wrong’ or ‘nerds’. Loss of social capital impacts not only students’ sense of their ability to interact with peers in social and academic settings, but also indicates the possibility that they might miss future opportunities for further building valuable social capital amongst academic equals if they become marked.
Thus, remaining unmarked enables students to preserve their social capital. Unmarked students can learn under the radar and exist within the larger cohort without being noticed or pointed out as abnormal. There are certain privileges that extend from this normativity – the privilege of moving through the lecture space without being singled out and the privilege of being able to learn without scrutiny. Students who occupy a normative and therefore ‘unmarked’ learner subjectivity when avoiding the app use garner access to these privileges, and this provides social incentive to avoid the interactive app in the lecture theatre.
This construction of the interactive app as being an ‘uncomfotable’ tool that positions students as ‘vulnerable’ challenges the idea that technology use is an activity that youths naturally gravitate towards (Prensky,
2001; Selwyn,
2012). While being on social networking is an almost compulsory element of mainstream western youth culture in the twenty-first century, social networking is usually a youth-led practice that takes place for social rather than educational reasons (Boyd,
2014; Pachler, Seipold, & Bachmair,
2012). By contrast, our educational technology intervention was teacher-led, and not on the students’ terms. Secondly, even in youth-led social networking spaces, it is now widely recognised that youths are heavily involved in risk management, inasmuch as their social media posts are carefully curated to project a particular self-image (Boyd,
2014; Davis & Gardner,
2013). In creating an academic online space, we inadvertently created a social space that students constructed as
uncomfortable and
risky, which significantly influenced students’ choices to reject the interactive app.
Unacademic: the interactive app as a disruption of students’ sense of themselves as ‘good’ students
A significant amount of literature on mobile learning highlights that mobile phones can be seen as a distraction from learning (Liu, Li, & Carlsson,
2010; Gikas & Grant,
2013; Kuznekoff & Titsworth,
2013; Thomas & O’Bannon,
2013; Pedro et al.,
2018). There is an assumption from many educators that mobile phones in class interrupt learning, creating student hesitance to be seen on the devices (Kuznekoff & Titsworth,
2013). Similarly, many students have highlighted how they can find mobile phones a distraction, particularly when push notifications appear on screen. Furthermore, the ability for the devices to emit loud noises such as the ringing from incoming calls and screen brightness means they have the capacity to distract not only the phone user, but surrounding students as well (Thomas & O’Bannon,
2013). While there appears to be some evidence that proficient students can multitask while using the devices (Kuznekoff & Titsworth,
2013), there nonetheless remains an undercurrent of resistance to mobile phones for learning within university discourse.
It is no surprise, then, that several students also saw the use of interactive apps as contravening their sense of themselves as ‘good’ academically inclined learners. Building upon the students’ constructions of ‘ideal’ lectures as didactic learning experiences, several students discussed that the use of mobile phones was not the ‘right’ way for them to behave in lectures and seminars. Several students, for example, discussed how the right way to behave was instead to dedicate focus upon the lecturer’s presentation:
So, I always get side tracked if I’m doing something else so if I focus on [the lecturer] then I won’t, like, I’ll do the right thing [Focus Group 3]
I won’t concentrate on my work if I’m busy doing the activities. [Focus Group 7]
If I’m on the phone I’m worried [the lecturer] will think I’m not paying attention and doing the wrong thing [Focus Group 8]
People usually hide their phones under the desk. It’s weird just having it out for the lecturer to see [Focus Group 3]
Kasworm (
2005) argues that the ideal academically inclined student image tends to be linked to notions of being serious, committed, purposeful, and attentive. These ideals are reinforced through education institutions’ cultures; cultures that often continue to actively work to
dissuade students from using mobile technologies in classrooms (Liu et al.,
2010). Idealised notions of the ‘committed’ and ‘attentive’ student could indeed conflict with perceptions that phones are a distraction and procrastination tool. Indeed, the above quotes show how some students in this study continued to see mobile technologies as unacademic, even when the interactive apps were encouraged by the lecturer.
Furthermore, academically inclined students can indeed be very active and busy during lectures
before interactive apps are introduced. With a lecturer talking at the front of class, students often feel compelled to ‘keep up’ by both note taking and actively listening (Boyle,
2011). Indeed, scholars from information processing theories (Mayer,
2009; Moreno & Mayer,
2007) tend to highlight the ways in which lecture slides, lecturer speech and note taking combined can lead to cognitive overload and the subsequent forgetting of key information. Introducing an interactive app could
add to the information being provided (Pedro et al.,
2018) and therefore
interrupt a student’s note taking – which they may find more important (Boyle,
2011; Di Leonardi,
2007). Here, whereas we valued in-time participation in a learning activity, the students may have valued record keeping more highly, so that they could engage in study at a later date.
We are not implying that the phones are necessarily negative for learning, or indeed necessarily a distraction for students. Instead, we are highlighting how they have the capacity to be
constructed (Brekhus et al.,
2010; Zerubavel,
1997) by both students and educators as unacademic devices, which can feed into students’ hesitance to embrace them in lectures. Even when students are encouraged to use interactive apps on mobile devices, they can continue to treat them with caution. The apps could either be seen as a potential ‘lure’ away from learning, an added degree of work on top of the work they already do during a lecture, or indeed a device seen to be used by people less interested in being academically inclined students.