Infrastructure and technology-enhanced learning: Context, agency, multiplicity

The notion of infrastructure is surprisingly under-theorised in studies of technology-enhanced learning (TEL), despite efforts to encourage models of infrastructure as social and relational. In this reflective paper, I discuss how I used theory about infrastructure derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and cultural anthropology (‘infrastructural theory’) to explain how academic librarians produce knowledge via Twitter in a research-intensive university in the United Kingdom. Infrastructural theory posits infrastructure as contingent, value laden, performative and remarkably fragile. Using a theoretical framework devised from the tenets of infrastructural theory, I found that academic librarians create knowledge infrastructures via Twitter that mobilise notions of invisibility, are rooted in professional values and aim for wide reach across the scholarly community. I conclude the paper with a discussion of how infrastructural theory can complicate existing approaches to infrastructure in TEL studies by drawing attention to the heterogeneity and agency inherent in infrastructure and how infrastructure and social practices are mutually constitutive. I further argue that infrastructural theory should be at the heart of design considerations for TEL and that the time is ripe for more robust theorisation of infrastructure in TEL