Digital technologies, participatory learning and the transformation of students’ conduct of everyday life

The teaching and learning spaces at universities are in transformation.
With the incorporation of electronic technologies like ipads, smart boards
and electronic platforms like “moodle” new digital spaces are emerging in
educational practices. These technological spaces are not only useful tools
expanding human activities, they are also powerful socio-political “forms
of life” (Langdon Winner) transforming fundamentally the practice of teaching and learning as well as the students’ conduct of everyday life. The
paper explores the meaning of digital learning spaces at universities (especially
Roskilde University) focusing on their implications for the learning
processes and conduct of life of students. Based on a conceptual inclusion
of the learning subjects and their conduct of everyday life into the research
and a discussion of the analytical concepts of defensive versus expansive
learning, the paper examines the contradictory forms of participation materialized in digital learning spaces and explores how they might relate to
the development of expansive learning.