I've spent the last couple of days working on buttons, an effort I'm sure any reasonable employer would consider a complete waste of time, but which to me is infinitely valuable. Until you actually encode a button, it is difficult to ask the questions you need ask about what a button does, what it represents, and what it says. A simple question, for example: when you push a button, does it stay down, or does it pop back up? If it's down and you push it again, does it pop back up, or does it stay down? Are there cases where, when you push it, nothing happens? All this creates a state space - a completely logical construction - and yet works within a very human socio-technological environment, which is why the colour, the shape, the shading and the behaviour of the button, the skeumorphics, matter.
That's why the questions that seem very obscure when David Jones writes about them here are to my mind solid and concrete and as practical as daylight. He points to "two shortcomings of most individual and organisational practices of 'digital' education (aka online learning etc.): few have actually grokked digital technologies, and even (fewer) recognise, let alone respond, the importance of 'the continuing and evolving entanglement' of the social, symbolic, and material of sociotechnical systems that Benbya et al (2020) identify." I think he's right, and when he asks "what are the symbols," he's not just talking about the letters, nor is he just talking about learning design elements like modules and classes, but also about everything in between. Like buttons.
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