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This paper looks at the use of online conference interaction as a part of a web-based distance-learning course. There has been much debate surrounding the potential of educational technology, particularly online conference interaction, to support teaching and learning yet little attention has been paid to student experiences and understandings of the online learning environment. Drawing on data from auto-ethnographic fieldwork the paper identifies 5 categories of participation in asynchronous online conferences: lurker participation, member participation, expert/experienced participation, flamer participation and joker participation. Through an exploration of these forms of participation the paper attempts to understand and illustrate the complexities and contradictions of situating conference interaction alongside the demands of study. The analysis highlights the role of online conferencing as a space for 'interaction work' distinct and separated from existing repertoires of formal study. The paper concludes by suggesting that pedagogically successful use of conferences as part of distance learning needs to understand the challenges and demands of remediating existing practices.

Abstract Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that is increasingly being heralded as a revolutionary technology that can offer verified records of information and value, namely property registration and cryptocurrencies. Its distributed quality makes it easier for individuals to jointly create, control and maintain information records. Blockchain is increasingly underpinning utopian visions of a digitally connected global society, in which frictionless interpersonal interaction and exchange take place without trusted intermediaries such as central banks and property registers. It adds democratic and participatory undertones to what is already a dominant mythology related to the valuation of digital data. Blockchain technology has fueled contemporary imaginaries about digital technologies. Wendy Chun identified "dreams of superhuman digital programmability" as the causal mechanisms behind a contemporary conflation between memory and storage: using digital technologies to combine the transitory and the permanent, and thus arrest the degeneration of memory. Blockchain expands these dreams from perfect memory to interpersonal processual programmability through the usage of smart contracts. These contracts are programs that are inscribed in the blockchain - which may be automatically triggered once certain conditions are met - that inspire a proliferation of utopian discourses about the possibilities associated with algorithmically regulated, blockchain-based forms of interpersonal exchange (known as token economics) and its expansion into unforeseen domains of sociality. Like all ideologies that compete for a hegemonic status, those ideologies which relate to technological solutionism require the effacement of their own self-perpetuating logic - and blockchain is the perfect example of a digital technology that seeks to provide solutions for the pitfalls of the previous "untrusted" and "insecure" digital technologies. Little attention is paid to the uncertainty surrounding blockchain technology, which is ...