This study aims to examine teachers’ embodiments online. The analysis is based ononline ethnographic data from two online courses in higher education settings usingdifferent information and communication technologies. The perspective of practicetheory and the concepts of being a body, having a body and the instrumental body wereused to analyse how teachers step into an embodied presence. The embodied presencedepends on both teacher judgements and what the technology offers. The finding addsto the understanding of the concept of teacher presence online, in showing that teacherembodiment occurs online and furthermore that the body could be understood asmultiple. The result also shows how online and offline bodies hang together,actualising the offline body in the online setting, which in turn raises questions onthe dualism of online and offline. Teachers also deliberately used their embodimentsand bodily traces online in order to sustain presence and to bring about certain teachingpractices. Their bodily positioning signalled what kind of teaching that would takeplace. A deliberate positioning of the online body in a virtual world also helped toreduce the complexity of the arrangements for the students.

This paper addresses teacher interventions in online teaching practices through the lens of practice theory. The analysis has its point of departure in an online ethnographic study comprising two settings, each focusing on a university course carried out entirely online. In this article, it is argued that the mode of teacher interventions is relational to the particular ICT that was used in each course. Furthermore, teacher interventions arranged both human and non-human entities to work as an interrelated teaching practice. This structuring of the teaching practice could be seen as a complex interplay of pedagogy, technology and the coconstitution of these. Teachers’ actions were organised by teleoaffective structures producing a calm and safe climate. Teachers fostered students’ learning by forcing the technology into the background so that students could focus on subject matter.

The aim of this article was to analyse relations between online teaching practices and their virtual material arrangements. Two higher education online settings were studied using an online ethnographic approach in which observation of the teaching process was of central importance. The first setting was a course in education carried out on itslearning© (a learning management system) and the second setting was a language course in Second Life® (a virtual world). A sociomaterial perspective based on practice theory was used in the analysis, and the focal point was the co-constitutive relation between teaching practices and material arrangements in online settings. A number of relations between practice and arrangement were identified and analysed in the results section. It is argued that the relation between online arrangements and practice is not fixed and determined beforehand, but emerges and alters as the teaching unfolds.

In this paper, technology use in a higher education setting online are analysed with a sociomaterial approach. The overarching aim with the study reported is to analyse the relation between teaching practice and technology in online pedagogy and the paper seeks to answer the question on how the online setting studied becomes intelligible as a teaching practice. A single subject university course in spoken language carried out online in the virtual world of Second Life® constitutes the setting. An online ethnographic approach with a major focus on participant observation of the teaching in the course has been used. Theoretical concepts on practice based on Schatzki are used in the analysis. The result shows that teaching practices in online settings are made intelligible through intentional, causal, spatial and prefigurative relations between teaching practices and material arrangements. The intelligibility of a setting is not created in advance, but is emergent and multifaceted.