Education in Cyberspace

Sian Bayne,Ray Land

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134332885
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education General

The use of online learning environments is now widespread, and there is a wealth of literature providing practical advice on how to teach online, develop courses and ensure effective pedagogical practice.

What has been frequently overlooked is the insight offered by cyberspace theory, which considers broader social, cultural and theoretical contexts within which new technologies and learning models are situated.

This book provides a fresh perspective on current thinking in e-learning. It challenges orthodox assumptions about the role of technology in the teaching and learning of the future, and explores more varied and wider-reaching conceptual frameworks for learning in cyberspace.

Featuring the contributions of respected and experienced experts with a wide range of perspectives, Education in Cyberspace will be valued by anyone closely involved in the theory of e-learning and education.

Part 1

Cultures

1 New Technologies, New Identities

The University in the Informational Age

Caroline Pelletier

Introduction

For the last fifteen years, the university has been suffering from an identity crisis. Under the impact of globalization and postmodernism, the university has been undermined sociologically and epistemologically (Barnett 2003). In a globalized, knowledge economy, universities have been co-opted as instruments of economic growth and social inclusivity whilst competing not only among themselves but also with scores of new knowledge producers, such as corporations, consultancies, research centres and think tanks. Just as universities have moved centre stage economically, the value of their basic resources – knowledge, truth and reason – has been deflated by postmodernism, with its emphasis on language, power and local narratives. A debate has ensued about the positive and negative implications for the university and, more fundamentally, about whether the university retains credibility either as a functioning institution or as a concept embodying certain ideals.

These transformations have been analysed from different perspectives. Scott emphasizes the impact of the shift from an elite to a mass higher education system, linking massification to the closer subordination of higher education to national political purposes (1998a, 1998b, 1995). Gibbons et al. focus on the transformation of knowledge production, with the new mode characterized by social accountability, reflexivity and problem solving in a practical rather than a cognitive context (1994). Delanty tackles the university’s cultural agenda, noting higher education’s role in supporting a more cosmopolitan version of citizenship (2001). Barnett places emphasis on the complexity of institutional management, examining how it has addressed competing ideological projects, such as quality, entrepreneurialism and competition (2003, 2000).

In most of these accounts, however, there has been little theorization of the role played by technology, despite widespread recognition of its importance. This omission has hampered a critique of the implications of technology within the university, and produced a plethora of crude ideas about its potential.

The literature on educational technology has not always proved helpful. In discussing the significance of new media for universities, it refers largely to their technical capabilities: how virtual learning environments enhance the experience of distance learning students, how electronically available resources aid research. Technology is understood largely in terms of the content it supports and the learning experience it stimulates. Such approaches are clearly useful and necessary, but they can often neglect to analyse the social, historical and institutional contexts within which technology is situated and used.

According to Cuban (1986) it is precisely this failure to appreciate the social context within which teachers and learners operate which has historically undermined the effort to transform educational practices through technology. Educational technologies, as Cuban emphasizes, are not simply the outcome of technological advance but the result of social and institutional demands which technology helps to fulfil. In this sense, technologies are systems of cultural transmission, creating new contexts within which existing social interests express themselves.

In the case of new media, these contexts are characterized by a shift in the flow of information. Networked technologies bring to an end the era of traditional mass communication that instituted a fundamental break between producers and receivers of information (Slevin 2000). In one-way mass communication – for example, printed books – the reciprocity and interdependency between providers and receivers is relatively straightforward; the reader reflects on the book in isolation from the author who wrote it; the book’s authority is established by its published status, that is, by its fixity; the user is separate from the knowledge production process. Current pedagogies and organizational structures within the university are heavily dependent on this pattern of information flow. The two-way nature of new media challenges these practices by allowing users and producers to interact. One-way communication gives way to dialogue, shifting the focus of interaction from the transmission of knowledge to its negotiation.

The consequences of these technical characteristics are not pre-determined. Interactivity can introduce new voices into the university, enabling perhaps more collaborative patterns of knowledge development, and more poststructuralist forms of subjectivity which Poster (1995, 1990) describes in terms of the mode of information. But they can also facilitate automated and repetitive testing, objectifying the student’s intellectual development, reinstating the figure of the autonomous rational learner in order better to submit them to an instrumental performative agenda (Lyotard 1984).

New media’s potential is realized at a particular time and place. In the university, technology is compounding the institution’s identity crisis. The various power brokers – such as the state, the academic community, corporations, civic organizations – enlist the help of technology to advance their own arguments and marginalize competing conceptions. They do so by presenting over-determined perspectives on the implications of technology for the university. New media are seen as having inherent consequences for the university’s practices and beliefs. To use Barnett’s term, technology is an ideology, similar in nature to other ideological projects within the university such as managerialism, entrepreneurialism or access (2003).

My aim in this chapter is to challenge deterministic conceptions of technology by emphasizing that it offers the university a set of choices. Those choices are not unlimited but bounded within our historical situation. New media, alongside globalization and postmodernism, are entering the university and the university will need to respond.

My argument has three parts. In the first, I pick out some central arguments from the globalization literature and highlight the context within which new media are deployed in the university. My aim is to emphasize that globalization combines contradictory, competing forces and that its consequences, therefore, are not determined. I go on to examine the options which new media hold for the university in terms of pedagogy and, in the third part, in terms of its future as an institution. My argument is that in order to identify and distinguish between the choices which new media present, the university requires a political consciousness – ‘political’ with a small ‘p’, as I am not rallying support for any particular form of politics. The university will inevitably make choices in the way it uses technology. The danger is that it will view these choices as purely technical matters, rather than ideological battles that have ramifications for the politics of globalization as they are played out in the university.

Globalization and the University

Many theorists adopt a deterministic view of globalization. In Castells’ work on the network society (2000, 1997), networked technology, free capital flows and technocratic capitalism are inseparably bound together. This determinism stems from a failure to distinguish between globalization as a sociological phenomenon (the spread of global communication networks, the consequent reordering of time and space, etc.) and globalization as a political project (the movement for free capital flows). As a result, sociological causes of globalization, such as information networks among other elements, are seen as having an inherent political identity. This obscures an analysis of the significance of globalization for the university and unnecessarily restricts the options available to it.

Two themes from the globalization literature can illustrate this point: the decline of the nation state and the reconstitution of space.

The Decline of the Nation State

The decline of the nation state has transformed the body politic. Once national citizens, we now assume significance as consumers and global citizens. Cast within the image of the nation state, the university’s identity undergoes a similar transformation, ceasing to be an institution of national culture, justified by the meta-narrative of emancipation, and instead providing the knowledge, skills and beliefs necessary to a globalized economy and governance system.

Some theorists, such as Barnett, have explored the creative opportunities opened up as a consequence (2000). The university is liberated from its duty to indoctrinate a parochial national culture and is intellectually rejuvenated by embracing the multiplicity of discourses in society. It no longer replicates elitist traditions, and instead assumes a more democratic role, experimenting with the different cognitive frameworks given voice by cultural fragmentation. As knowledge is less important than attitude in the fast-paced globalized economy, the university need no longer objectify students as vessels of knowledge, but can focus instead on enabling them to determine their own subjectivities and cultivate their ability to respond to change. Uncertainty and complexity here are a universal cultural conditions, affecting all social agents alike.

Other theorists, such as Sennett (1998), argue that globalization has not led to creative, multicultural possibilities but to a more exploitative form of capitalism. The function of education, according to this scenario, becomes the aversion of risk. By generating technical skills for employability, the university seeks to deliver a new but fragile version of security, one based on human capital. From this perspective, the university becomes the ally of a ruthless economic system, reskilling individuals without giving them a stable sense of security, be it material or ontological. Risk, complexity, the fragmentation of identity, may be cultural phenomena but they can be deployed as political strategies. Uncertainty is not politically innocent. Whilst liberating for some, it is debilitating for others.

The problem with Barnett’s perspective is that it focuses on globalization’s sociological attributes and overlooks its political context. Sennett, however, does not examine how globalization opens up new avenues for changing the situation it describes.

A third perspective is possible. One could argue that the university would be failing its learners if it simply despaired of political action or took it as given, as a cultural inevitability. As the university helped create, and continues to sustain, globalization’s social conditions, supplying the system with the raw material of growth – knowledge – it seems reasonable to argue that it has a duty to intervene in the resulting social politics. It could be expected to educate in a way that enables individuals to create their own subjectivities, whilst enabling them to resist becoming marginalized labour, prime-tuned for exploitation, as portrayed in Sennett’s work. This requires a political consciousness about the uneven, unequal way globalization affects individuals, and a belief that something positive can be done about it.

In practice, the university has not proved adept at resisting powerful interests, particularly the state. It has maintained a policy of noninterference in society to protect its own academic autonomy. Yet it is precisely this attempt to remain apolitical that is so clamorously partisan. The values which the university is adopting in a globalized world – performativity, the mercantilization of knowledge, the extension of property rights to intellectual matters – are those which have shrunk the measure of what is valuable in the university to what is productive economically.

The Reconstitution of Space

A second theme within the globalization literature is the reconstitution of space. In the analysis of this phenomenon, the same confusion often arises between the sociological and the political. The argument runs as follows: by allowing interaction to take place in physically disjointed places, new technologies re-define space-specific notions such as ‘community’ or the ‘university’ as processes rather than places. For example, the identity of the UK Open University, which uses technology extensively, is not based on location but in terms of information flows between displaced students, tutors and researchers. Process, rather than space, holds the academic community together.

Some theorists go on to argue that these changes in conceptions of space lead to the creation of new elites. Castells (2000, 1997) argues that elites are no longer tied to places but become unified around the globe through networks, producing an internet culture whose identity is not linked to any specific society but to membership of the managerial circles of the informational economy. Castells’ argument suggests that those universities historically focused on creating elites would as a result become institutions of ahistorical, acultural learning, detached from specific locales. On the other hand, those universities that define their mission mainly in terms of widening participation would remain rooted in the culture of their locality. This would make higher education a site of structural schizophrenia, between two spatial logics: the space of network flows and space of real places. The disjuncture could worsen social divisions resulting from social groups constructing their identity around either physical, or virtual, time and place. Some might say that this has already happened in higher education, pointing to the division between universities adopting a local mission aimed at widening participation, and those that maintain their exclusivity to target high-flying, high fee-paying audiences.

However, by collapsing the consequences of technology into fears about political globalization, Castells overlooks the possibility that networks might foster cultural dialogue rather than tribalism, exchange rather than schizophrenia. This more optimistic interpretation necessitates a wider understanding of information, encompassing information as culture as well as instrumental data (Delanty 2001). This conception roots information flows in the historical and cultural circumstances of participating actors. The university, in this scenario, would broker cultural knowledge across time and space, promoting inter-cultural exchange rather than tribalism.

My contention is therefore that, in interpreting globalization, maintaining a distinction between the sociological and the political is crucial. Globalization, and the new technologies which enable it, do not inherently express a political ideology. Though bounded by context, social agents do not simply incarnate network logic, be ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Cultures
• Part 2: Discourses
• Part 3: Environments
• Part 4: Subjects
• Index