‘Everything is connected’: Exploring the intersections between life, work, play and education through student use of technology in self-directed learning

Abstract

How students engage in learning outside the classroom is complex and in part a self-determined activity. Occurring in spaces on and off campus and using technology students themselves bring to their learning or provided for them by the University, self-directed learning has increasingly become a fractured, unsupported and unstructured component of modern higher education. This article draws on the digital stories of 182 students at the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK) to interrogate how students respond and react to the requirements of learning arising from classroom teaching and summative assessment. The stories exposed liminal spaces in which students are constructing learning in unique and some fragile interconnections between life, work, play and learning.