The students' use of social media during lessons and in group work is a general concern amongst teachers especially from secondary school and onwards. The blurred ecotones between private, social and academic life brought on by the always present online mobile technology makes utilization of social media in teaching a balancing act. On the one hand the teachers in this study welcome the possibilities for communicating, sharing and producing academically relevant products, and on the other hand they fear that the rhizomatic connection between what is academic and what is regarded as non-academic is disrupting the learning process. Hence, teachers take different measures in order for the ecotones to either separate or engage in fruitful synergy. In this study two very different approaches are taken within similar pedagogical designs in a highly comparable context. In theory the outcome of the pedagogic design should be the same but in practice the two teachers achieve very different results. The study utilizes the deleuzean notion of 'interest' and 'desire' and problematizes the common use of 'motivation' in pedagogy. The study analyzes what appears to be a conflict between the institutionalized 'interests' of the educational system and personal 'desires' of the student. In one case the institutionalized interest and the personal desire of the student share a significant intersection; whereas the other case shows a clash of 'interest' and 'desire'. The study also shows a clash between content driven teaching and learning driven teaching. Finally the study shows that if a pedagogic design is imposed upon a teacher without his acceptance or full understanding of the design then the outcome is questionable. The study suggests a different approach to motivation that acknowledges that the process of learning is a desire of 'becoming' not the 'pleasure' of satisfaction through entertaining activities. At the school, where this study was carried out almost every student brings their own devices to class. For the most part the students live in a state of omnipotent onlineness where postponed replies in social media is considered impolite therefore controlled and restricted use of social media in particular and smartphone in general result in conflicts. The teachers at this school take different measures in the fight for getting the students attention; some teachers are very proactive, they collect smartphones in the beginning of classes and so forth, while other teachers resignate in inaction. But for the most part the teachers try to incorporate social media in the pedagogical design (blogs, google drive, socrative etc.). The incorporation of social media is done in many ways; one is to create intrinsic motivation through accommodating to the means of communication that the students use in their private lives, another is to try to move the academic tasks into social media. In both cases the use of technology is blurring the ecotones between academic and non-academic life. The blurring of ecotones brought on by online, personal devices is a general concern in this study. Case 1 shows a teacher (referred to as teacher 1) who tries to utilize the academic affordances of social media, while case 2 (referred to as teacher 2) tries to maintain a well-defined ecotone between private and academic. In this study social media has the role of; hand-in folder, feedback channel and assignment distribution. It is merely a tool that is in everybody's shared repertoire and not so much an attempt to create extrinsic motivation through accommodation to youth culture. The theory of science behind this study is Critical Realism. The methodology is design based research.
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