“Phenomenology in Action for Researching Networked Learning”

New phenomenology publication. Editors: Michael Johnson, Felicity Healey-Benson, Catherine Adams, & Nina Bonderup Dohn. Springer (2024) – ebook out now!

Phenomenology in Action for Researching Networked Learning
Michael Johnson, Felicity Healey-Benson, Catherine Adams & Nina Bonderup Dohn (eds.)
Cham: Springer (2024)

Link to Springer – where book is now available as an ebook and can be bought in hard copy for delivery early September. Phenomenology in Action for Researching Networked Learning | SpringerLink

Abstract: This book champions phenomenology’s place in networked learning theory, research, and practice. The book illuminates and showcases something of the powerful richness, depth, and novel insights offered by phenomenological perspectives on human experience to invoke a fundamental rethinking of experience in networked learning. It also signals the broader learning technology community to acknowledge and engage with these perspectives. The editors and authors have collaborated to bring a renewed focus upon the human facet of networked learning. As our world becomes more digitally enmeshed, infiltrated, and contested, the need to investigate and convey, at maximum fidelity, the lived experience of learners, teachers, and other stakeholders in education becomes paramount. Through phenomenological inquiry, we disclose the complex dance between the human and the technical, spotlighting how individuals engage, navigate, and find meaning within virtual yet embodied landscapes. This approach suitably honours the complexity, profundity, and ethicality of human existence in our evolving digital ecologies. The first section, “Phenomenological Perspectives in Researching Networked Learning” lucidly explains phenomenology and some of its potential affordances. The second section, “Practising Phenomenological Research in Networked Learning”, explicates the tangible practice of phenomenological research into specific phenomena: chapters sample of a select range of studies that also indicate the kind of insights such research can bring to networked learning. The concluding section presents two chapters that denote novel and arresting, “Critical Phenomenological Perspectives on Networked Learning”. Together, these final chapters demonstrate the type of radical challenge that phenomenology can bring to the field, refreshing even networked learning’s most basic conceptions and practices. With this book, we open a space for anyone who wishes to join us in the wonderful, inspiring, and challenging application of phenomenology within the field of networked learning.

Representing a Canadian-Welsh-Danish collaboration, the hanfod.NL team—Dr Mike Johnson, Dr Felicity Healey-Benson, Professor Cathy Adams, and Professor Nina Bonderup Dohn—are thrilled to share the newest edition to the Springer Research in Networked Learning Series. Alongside the opportunity to share their our own phenomenological contributions, their pride and joy clearly extends to a remarkable group of authors who have enriched this publication with their insights. In order of appearance in the book, this includes Dr Lucy Osler (Cardiff University), Associate Professor Kyungmee Lee (Seoul National University), Associate Professor Jean du Toit (North-West University), Associate Professor Gregory Swer (University of KwaZulu-Natal), Dr Joni Turville (Alberta Teachers’ Association), Sean Groten and Yin (Iris) Yin (University of Alberta), Professor Norm Friesen (Boise State University), and Assistant Professor Greta Goetz (Belgrade University).