La reforma al artículo 1º constitucional y el sistema de fuentes

To conclude this chapter the comment from Pete, a year 1 music student was quite enlightening.

Pete: They can be quite isolating as the teacher kind off isolates himself from the students

and doesn't really go around as much as they should do. I mean me myself, I'm admitting this openly, I'm like constantly going on MySpace and YouTube and I get distracted from my work and I need that pressure to be there...

What Pete refers to as ‘isolating’ has two connotations, firstly, tutors being sat at the staff computer at the furthest end of the room and secondly he clearly needed more support and as he said, ‘I need the pressure to be there’. Noticeably, the tutors had other duties that intruded into their contact times with students, as identified earlier with Bob. At times the tutors also had a significant amount of marking, or feedback on draft work that students had emailed through and the only way they could manage this load was by balancing their activities in the classroom in what they considered to be the most appropriate way.

6.10 CONCLUSION

Whatever an analysis, or range of opinions and expectations of students are posited, if there is some sort of deficit in the classroom, there is a probability that under these technology rich conditions students will signify their response by drawing on their cultural practices with the available technologies.

As Stiegler (2010: 4 original emphasis) comments contemporary culture can capture ‘the attention of young minds in their time of “brain availability”’. Ideally, classroom activities should fully occupy students for the duration of the session, or at least that was from the standpoint of the lesson plans that were produced for the few teaching observations that took place during the time of the classroom research. And, from the tutors’ position on a day-to-day basis where it seemed that the onus was on the students to remain engaged as part of their capacity for independent learning (also see Section 2.1.2). As indicated in Section 2.3.3, students have grown up in an age where attention has been socially and culturally shaped to engage with ranging modes of information, often

simultaneously from different sources. As Lanham (2006) argues, in a media and information rich age, it is attention as a commodity that is in shortage and fought over by all the ‘fluff’ around us. Therefore for students, to sit down at a computer focused on one task for hours at a time, may seem to be a disjuncture, between educational expectations and students’ attention and learning

preferences, especially if this is repeatedly re-enacted. Classrooms then risk becoming sites of mundanity and therefore out of context with student needs for teaching and learning to be engaging and stimulating.

The polyvalency of computers renders them to be imbued with meaning from both education and students use of them of social and cultural objects; therefore it can be understood if an off-task use of them may seem more appealing at times than coursework. However, education pathologises students’ use of digital technologies for anything other than educational tasks. It was viewed as misconduct and students would be threatened by loss of Internet access for a period of up to two weeks if this became a consistent offence. It is worth reiterating that none of the students involved in the research had behavioural issues and all viewed the course subject as something to do beyond education; therefore consistent off-task use indicated something other than mis-conduct occurring.

If classroom activities are limiting in their engagement for students whose culturally formed

attention needs are shaped through multimodal stimulation and rapid exchanges of information then there clearly will be a misaligned between curriculum, or the pedagogical interpretation of it and what would satisfy students preferred way of learning. It could be argued that student attention is ephemeral in nature as it works its way through the ‘fluff’ (Lanham, 2006) that new media and technologies continually surround us by in our daily online and offline lives and therefore education needs to adapt to that, otherwise interest and intention can move to whatever provides the most stimulus.

It can therefore be understood how networked technologies can facilitate a movement away from the challenges of education, however temporary or iteratively this is performed. To draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) spatial concept of a line of flight this movement away from one context, to another can be conceptualised as becoming an agential act of deterritorialization from education’s activities and space to then reterritorialize on to another activity, or digital space. As Youdell (2011: 32 original emphasis) indicates, referencing Deleuze and Guattari, it can be imagined as, ‘escaping this and ‘becoming’ otherwise’, although in this context still within the frames of a faceted identity Notably, as a concept within this context, a line of flight opens up opportunities for conceptualising this behaviour but it is limiting and this is explored more intently in Section 2.3.4. This is especially pertinent as a line of flight is singular in direction and aim, whereas as illustrated in Section 2.1.6 and 2.1.7 attention and identity have the capacity for fluidity and presence can be achieved simultaneously within different settings. Consequently, there can be an oscillation of attention and presence between differing contexts and activities, and therefore intentions.

The next chapter, Chapter 7, extends the research focus from the computer-resourced classroom itself, as an environment, and how students could be distracted by technologies to how students approached their academic work during the sessions when the computer was the predominant educational resource. This directly draws in the research question: How do students use these technologies for research purposes and then the processing of information that is sourced?