Geeks, gamers, and girls: revealing diverse digital identities with membership categorisation analysis

ABSTRACT

The ‘digital imperative’ of contemporary education practice is without contention; however, much learning technology research has focused on pragmatic issues such as learning design, often founded on uncritically accepted claims about ‘digital natives’. This focus has come at the expense of learning theory. Alongside the scholarly voices calling for education research to redress this imbalance, there is increasing interest in the role played by technology not only in epistemological learning, but also in the ways technology is an identity issue. This paper explores how membership categorisation analysis opens up ways of understanding the role of technology for contemporary learner identities. Examination of student talk makes visible the diverse ways of being an iPad-using student, challenges widely-accepted constructions of contemporary learners as generationally uniform, and contributes to a more holistic conception of learning that accounts for the role played by technology in learning identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Membership categorisation analysis
• digital natives
• learning technology research
• ontology

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) throughout the duration of the doctoral research upon which this paper draws, and the guidance and support of doctoral supervisors, Professor Peter Renshaw and Dr Louise Phillips.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Katherine F. McLay http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7111-5396

Notes

1 All names of people, places and institutions are pseudonyms.

2 For a critical evaluation of the use and value of microethnography (also referred to as ‘focused ethnography’), see Muecke, 1994.

3 While aspects of analysis and findings may be relevant to contexts using handheld devices other than iPads, the term ‘iPads’ is used to make clear that this research is not unquestioningly applying ideas beyond the specific context under scrutiny.