Investigating learning with digital technologies in higher education from a qualitative research perspective: Challenges and prospects

In this presentation, I will discuss my experiences of conducting qualitative research on the mediation of higher education learning and teaching by digital technologies. To this end, I will share excerpts from my interviews with lecturers and students from the University of Groningen, as well as field notes from my observations in master-level courses at the same University. The emphasis of this presentation will be on the main challenges related to this kind of research. More specifically, I will attempt to highlight the difficulties of investigating nonhumans (in this case, digital technologies) in qualitative research. These difficulties are related to the fact that qualitative research has traditionally been preoccupied with human processes of meaning making, and not with the material conditions that underpin these processes. Therefore, there are currently not very well-developed qualitative methodologies to study material processes, in education and beyond. Despite these difficulties, I will suggest that qualitative research can potentially be a very fruitful research methodology for the investigation of the materiality of human life, and of the mediation of learning and teaching by digital technologies, in particular.