Disabling and Enabling Technologies for Learning in Higher Education for All: Issues and Challenges for Whom?
Journal Title: Informatics - Year 2016, Vol 3, Issue 4
Abstract
Integration, inclusion, and equity constitute fundamental dimensions of democracy in post-World War II societies and their institutions. The study presented here reports upon the ways in which individuals and institutions both use and account for the roles that technologies, including ICT, play in disabling and enabling access for learning in higher education for all. Technological innovations during the 20th and 21st centuries, including ICT, have been heralded as holding significant promise for revolutionizing issues of access in societal institutions like schools, healthcare services, etc. (at least in the global North). Taking a socially oriented perspective, the study presented in this paper focuses on an ethnographically framed analysis of two datasets that critically explores the role that technologies, including ICT, play in higher education for individuals who are “differently abled” and who constitute a variation on a continuum of capabilities. Functionality as a dimension of everyday life in higher education in the 21st century is explored through the analysis of (i) case studies of two “differently abled” students in Sweden and (ii) current support services at universities in Sweden. The findings make visible the work that institutions and their members do through analyses of the organization of time and space and the use of technologies in institutional settings against the backdrop of individuals’ accountings and life trajectories. This study also highlights the relevance of multi-scale data analyses for revisiting the ways in which identity positions become framed or understood within higher education.
Authors and Affiliations
Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, Giulia Messina Dahlberg and Ylva Winther
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP44066
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics3040021
- Views 245
- Downloads 0
Big Data in the Era of Health Information Exchanges: Challenges and Opportunities for Public Health
Public health surveillance of communicable diseases depends on timely, complete, accurate, and useful data that are collected across a number of healthcare and public health systems. Health Information Exchanges (HIEs)...
Requirements and Pitfalls in AAL Projects. Guide to Self-Criticism for Developers from Experience
Since 2012, several national and international projects on ambient assisted living (AAL) active and healthy ageing gave insight into the different steps of development processes where the requirements of the target gro...
Improving Semantic Similarity with Cross-Lingual Resources: A Study in Bangla—A Low Resourced Language
Semantic similarity is a long-standing problem in natural language processing (NLP). It is a topic of great interest as its understanding can provide a look into how human beings comprehend meaning and make association...
digiMe: An Online Portal to Support Connectivity through E-Learning in Medical Education
Connectivity is intrinsic to all aspects of our life today, be it political, economic, technological, scientific, or personal. Higher education is also transcending the previous paradigm of technology enabled content d...
Motivation and User Engagement in Fitness Tracking: Heuristics for Mobile Healthcare Wearables
Wearable fitness trackers have gained a new level of popularity due to their ambient data gathering and analysis. This has signalled a trend toward self-efficacy and increased motivation among users of these devices. F...