Higher Education Students’ Experiences of Digital Learning and (Dis)empowerment (Costa et al., 2018)

The study explores higher education students’ sense of agency and autonomy in the context of the digital participatory culture of the web, applied to their formal learning practices. The research found that although students were proficient web users, they did not exercise learner agency beyond what they assumed was expected of them. This is framed as evidence of the stability of their learning habitus, in Bourdieu’s terms, in relation to academic learning conventions. The article also emphasizes that students see the web not only as a space of student participation but of student surveillance, which serves as a barrier to the fostering of meaningful participation.