This book champions phenomenology’s place in networked learning theory, research, and practice. The book illuminates and showcases something of the powerful richness, depth, and novel insights offered by phenomenological perspectives on human experience to invoke a fundamental rethinking of experience in networked learning. It also signals the broader learning technology community to acknowledge and engage with these perspectives. The editors and authors have collaborated to bring a renewed focus upon the human facet of networked learning. As our world becomes more digitally enmeshed, infiltrated, and contested, the need to investigate and convey, at maximum fidelity, the lived experience of learners, teachers, and other stakeholders in education becomes paramount. Through phenomenological inquiry, we disclose the complex dance between the human and the technical, spotlighting how individuals engage, navigate, and find meaning within virtual yet embodied landscapes. This approach suitably honours the complexity, profundity, and ethicality of human existence in our evolving digital ecologies. The first section, “Phenomenological Perspectives in Researching Networked Learning” lucidly explains phenomenology and some of its potential affordances. The second section, “Practising Phenomenological Research in Networked Learning”, explicates the tangible practice of phenomenological research into specific phenomena: chapters sample of a select range of studies that also indicate the kind of insights such research can bring to networked learning. The concluding section presents two chapters that denote novel and arresting, “Critical Phenomenological Perspectives on Networked Learning”. Together, these final chapters demonstrate the type of radical challenge that phenomenology can bring to the field, refreshing even networked learning’s most basic conceptions and practices. With this book, we open a space for anyone who wishes to join us in the wonderful, inspiring, and challenging application of phenomenology within the field of networked learning.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Phenomenological Perspectives in Researching Networked Learning.- Chapter 2: Networked Learning and the Promises of Phenomenology - Lucy Osler.- Chapter 3: Investigating the background – taking a Merleau-Pontian phenomenological approach to Networked Learning - Nina Bonderup Dohn.- Chapter 4: Evocative writing and lived experience descriptions for networked learning research - Kyungmee Lee.- Chapter 5: Phenomenological research into being a student with a mobile phone - Mike Johnson.- Part II: Doing Phenomenological Research in Networked Learning.- Chapter 6: Networked learning in the time of pandemic: Intersubjectivity and alienation - Jean du Toit and Gregory Swer.- Chapter 7: What is it like for a learner to participate in a Zoom Breakout Room session? - Felicity Healey-Benson, Mike Johnson, Catherine Adams, Joni Turville.- Chapter 8: Tomorrow’s Networked Posthumans: Phenomenological Reflections on Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Well-Being of Young Children - Catherine Adams, Sean Groten and Yin Yin.- Part III: Critical(?) Phenomenological Perspectives on Networked Learning.- Chapter 9: Networked Learning, Teaching and Normativity: A Phenomenological Deconstruction - Norm Friesen.- Chapter 10: Re-presencing the network in networked learning design - Greta Goetz.- Chapter 11: Network internalities in protest and political participation - Stig Børsen Hansen.- Chapter 12: Conclusion.