Author: Antonella Esposito
Programme: Doctoral Programme in Education and ICT (e-learning)
Language: English
Supervisors: Dr Albert Sangrà and Dr Marcelo Maina
Faculty / Institute: eLearn Center
Subjects: Higher Education, Universities
Key words: Doctoral researchers, Digital scholars, Learning ecologies, Chronotope, Digital engagement
Area of knowledge: e-Learning

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Summary

This doctoral dissertation is concerned with an exploratory study on how emerging learning ecologies enabled by Web 2.0 and social web are affecting the self-organized practices and dispositions in the digital settings of individual doctoral students. The research endorses a constructivist grounded theory approach, where data collection has been undertaken across three Italian and one UK universities and has included a sequence of online questionnaires, individual interviews, and focus groups.

The findings being generated provide a repertoire of social media practices for research purposes; a framework conceptualizing the trajectories in the digital, in terms of space, time, socialization, digital identity, stance and tensions; the forms of resilience and the tensions underlying the doctoral researchers' digital engagement. The affordances of doctoral e-researchers' emerging ecologies are therefore understood as multi-dimensional and transitional trajectories intentionally undertaken by the individuals and generating a range of reactions toward the opportunities provided by the open Web.