Beyond an ethic of efficiency: Digital learnings spaces and/as materiality

Digital course offerings continue to proliferate across the landscape of higher education, and thus they warrant close and critical examination. In this research study, I take a materialist approach to examining and better understanding digital learning environments. Through a materially-minded research method/ology, which incorporates both an ideological analysis and ethnograph-esque data, I argue that institutional perspectives frequently value digital learning spaces primarily for their ability to efficiency in compress time and geographic space. From an institutional lens, then, digital learning spaces are often underwritten by an ideological commitment to an ethic of efficiency, which values efficiency-for-efficiency’s sake. However, students’ experiences with/in digital learning contexts suggests that these same environments exist beyond an ethic of efficiency. More than places of efficiency, digital learning spaces can productively be read as complex material hypertexts that are places of non-efficiency. The results of this research study suggest that, far from being the backdrop for rhetorical action, students’ material surround his deeply consequential. In addition to contributing to a deeper understanding of digital learning environments, this research project also argues for and works to enact a materialist (re)vision of research method/ologies as rhetorical in[ter]vention. This argument (re)frames how research method/ologies are enacted as well as for how they are communicated and presented.