ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on resources from the work of Michel Foucault to begin an examination of the influence of e-learning on the disciplines and disciplinary practices within universities. These explorations are guided by the view that discussion of e-learning within the education literature remains overwhelmingly positioned within a modernist metanarrative (Lyotard 1979) of contributing to ‘truth’ and ‘emancipation’, enabling learners to become more ‘autonomous’, where autonomy is assumed unproblematically to be a good thing. Even where a potential for computerized information technologies to transform learning is posited, arguments tend to be underpinned by an assumption that the rest is business as usual. For example, e-learning is argued to increase the speed of communication and interaction, its ‘volume’, ‘variety’ and ‘value’ (Garrison and Anderson 2003), but analysis does not go further than this. Lyotard, of course, saw wider implications in the increase in computerized forms of communication and information technology for the kinds of knowledge that would be legitimized within an information age. Debates elsewhere about education and the university suggest that there may be more to say about what goes on through e-learning (Usher and Edwards 1994; Lankshear et al. 2002; Lea and Nicoll 2002). These are suggestive of the need to re-evaluate modernist stances and to examine e-learning as a far more ambivalent set of cultural practices.
