iPads in learning: The web of change

Research in learning technologies has often focused on the affordances of single technologies such as pcs, smartphones or interactive whiteboards. However, in most learning environments technologies do not stand alone but are embedded in activity structures and webs of materials that make up the learning activity. This is specifically relevant when the object of study is mobile learning, where devices are flexible and follow the learner in his/her shifting learning activities and needs. This paper focuses on the ways in which iPads as learning technologies become involved in sociomaterial practices that are emergent and improvisational and how this contributes to educational change. The paper proposes that the introduction of tablets into classrooms will enroll devices in networks of learning that establish new and significant relationships between learning technologies such as iPads, whiteboards, pcs as well as books, pens and paper. These relationships challenge the idea that iPads can act as isolated and unique actors in educational development. The paper focuses on the ways in which teachers negotiate material cultures in schooling when iPads are involved in learning, i.e. how they become central actors in linking, translating and creating trajectories between the artefacts of learning. I study these processes from three perspectives that I identify as respectively capturing, bricolaging and building knowledge.