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Studio 1 addresses issues pertaining to knowledge in transformation, particularly in relation to technological advancements in various professional domains. Empirical studies are conducted in university-based professional education as well as technology intense work settings.

Three key-concepts form the basis of the research agenda: Instruction, Interaction and Materiality.

• Instruction puts an analytical focus on the ways in which people at work and in educational settings make actions and objects intelligible to each other; for instance, how they develop shared criteria for professional judgments or achieve common understandings of a subject matter.
• Interaction specifies an interest in how instructions and instructed actions are accomplished in moment-to-moment interaction. By video-recording interaction, it becomes possible to capture and analyse detailed aspects of how people deal with problems of critical concern for professional conduct.
• Materiality refers to an interest in the ways interaction and the transformation of knowledge are bound up with artefacts, objects and other constituents of the material surroundings: for instance, with novel digital tools for diagnosing diseases or with ways of visualizing procedures in dental education. Embodied aspects of the ways participants handle these technologies are also accorded a central analytic place.

The research in Studio 1 relies on inter-disciplinary collaboration between the social sciences and other disciplines, at this point in architecture, radiology, radiation physics, endodontics, health sciences, and shipping and marine technology. The studies take a starting point in issues identified by the disciplines of specific professions, and use video recordings as a basis for analytical observations. The studies aim to produce results of relevance for the social sciences as well as the other participating disciplines. A further aim is to contribute in the development of work practice and in the design of education for the professions.

Digital technology, media and the Internet are increasingly used in the communication between experts and laymen. Today, scientifically generated knowledge and controversies are encountered and propagated through digital technologies, creating arenas for participation and provoking discussions on knowledge and expertise.

However, this is not a movement restricted to the introduction of computers and the Internet. During different times arenas for communication and participation in knowledge building between experts and laymen have been established, blurring the boundary between scientists and the lay. This also includes motivation for higher education, begging questions of how meaning and importance of learning has been framed during different times and contexts.

Studio 2 focus both contemporary and historical cases of the role of technologies in expanding the relations between experts and the lay, and the implications for learning and participation for both parties.

In recent decades, the development of digital technology and expansion of the Internet have resulted in significant changes in the media ecologies people use in their daily lives. Important consequences of these developments concern the socialization of new generations, where the values, skills and identities of young people are shaped through their participation in activities where technologies such as virtual environments and social media play an significant role.

The focus of LETStudio 3 is to unpack the consequences of the transformations that are currently underway and visible in many learning settings both inside and outside schools. The intention is to illuminate alternative settings and ways of learning where digital technology plays a significant role.

Studying virtual technologies and social media raises a number of analytic and methodological questions involving ways to understand these technologies and how to study them. These questions include:

• How can we study the virtual environment and what is going on there without losing what is happening locally? The social is happening digitally, but is also a situated, local activity.
• To what extent must one learn a medium or platform before one can use it to communicate? What obstacles must be overcome to become literate with a new medium or platform?
• What are the consequences of appropriating a leisure medium as an educational medium?
• Different tools are operated with different rules in different environments. How do digital environments function differently in different institutional and cultural contexts?
• What are the traces of a having used a digital tool in the subsequent conversations of users?

These research questions have been investigated in a number of research projects in Studio 3. Our research covers the use of social media such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, as well as educational platforms such as Einztein and Carbon Footprint Calculator.