Russell Francis is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow with the Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning, Interaction and Mediated Communications in Contemporary Society (LinCS) at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning, University of Gothenburg. His research explores the implications of media change for learning, cognition and education. Previously he worked at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies and Oxford University’s Department of Education where he completed his graduate studies.
The Predicament of the Learner in the New Media Age, Russell’s doctoral thesis, explores the shifting locus of agency for regulating and managing learning as an emergent web-based participatory culture starts to disrupt a top-down culture industry model of education that evolved around the medium of the book. The main empirical study focuses on the practices of graduate students as they start to appropriate web-based tools and digital resources for private study and self-education. At a descriptive level emblematic vignettes offer a patchwork of localized insider perspectives upon a college culture in the process of transition. However, the aim is to offer a rigorous methodology and conceptual framework for investigating an emergent culture of learning more generally. Aspects of this work have been presented at international peer-reviewed conferences and leading research centers.
Russell’s first book, The Decentring of the Traditional University: The Future of (Self) Education in Virtually Figured Worlds (2010), provides a more accessible treatment of key concepts emerging from his research for a wider readership. Overall, this work suggests that we have entered a historic period of systemic change in the culture of higher education; a process that is now driven from the bottom-up by the changing practices of students themselves.
At Gothenburg Russell is developing the research agenda he started at Oxford into an international and comparative study. This phase will also explore how the findings of his ethnographic work can inform a developmental research agenda. To this end he is leading a series of social media workshops. The aim is to equip participants with a conceptual tool-kit for thinking about, reflecting upon and discussing their own social networking practices.
Across this site you can find out more about Russell’s past and current research interests. Drop him an e-mail or link-up at Academia.edu if you wish to find out more.
