Hubs sociaux et illusions d'institutionnalisation de soi en éducation

This presentation looks at social hubs in higher education. Social hubs are dematerialized spaces, physical or mixed, including at least one technical device (digital, architectural, etc.), designed to promote info-communication convergence and outreach. Considered as meeting points, they support exchanges between people, structures and institutions.Early work (Gobert, 2009) referred to airport hubs to represent mediations driven by socionumeric devices such as Facebook. Still relevant today, these devices encourage the compulsive repetition of posts. Similar to “activities of a media nature”, they fuel an “institutionalization of the self” and, in certain situations, optimism biases such as “illusions of institutionalization of the self”.In education, many establishments wish to be assimilated to social hubs. Social hubbing tasks are multiplying to convey the image of meeting spaces and third places that are meaningful in the learning market and motivate students. The hubs approach is therefore a key issue for information and communication sciences in educational fields, training, health (scoping behaviors) and image reporting (cinejournalism).In this context, work on interactions and interactivities carries strong epistemological and empirical challenges. Beyond questioning the forms of technical mediation and interrelationships, they concern social practices. For example, consecration behaviors (being forced to consume in order to create and vice versa) and illusions of control or competence are strongly accentuated. Similarly, the forms of presence and attention require requalification, particularly in educational settings, where their impact on learning is particularly significant.This is why, after a definitional approach, we will come back to the evolution of interfaces before synthesizing the longitudinal observations made during research work related to ICT and ICT. These works sign the influences of the means of mediation and the engineering of the devices on the types of interaction and underline the need to question without compromise the uses and the very notion of device.