ABSTRACT
The last decade has seen a proliferation of applications of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in all educational sectors. This volume responds to this broader context and to the convergence of technological change with structural reorganization that has affected post-compulsory education worldwide. The impact of new technological practices in colleges and universities can be seen right across the spectrum of professional activity, from the digitizing of management information, to the use of virtual learning environments (VLEs) in teaching and learning, to the development of digital scholarship in academic research. The nature and scale of this impact varies from institution to institution. In one setting, for example, we might find frustrated learning technologists bemoaning the existence of academic ‘dinosaurs’ who continue to resist using VLEs or the internet. In another, there are teachers who pride themselves on being early adopters of the latest technologies, but who are now finding that the innovative nature of what they are doing — in both their teaching and their own scholarship — is being undermined by institutional policy. For example, they may be facing a requirement to teach using digital tools and materials developed elsewhere and ‘bought in’ for primarily economic, as opposed to pedagogic reasons. Elsewhere, teachers, researchers, and administrators are quietly getting on with using technologies, day to day, and developing new ways of working, which, whilst seemingly unremarkable to them, are potentially very significant in terms of change in the production of knowledge in the institution as a whole. Digitization thus makes its mark in many different ways: on research and teaching; course design and assessment; professional and academic development; enrolment, registration, and ongoing student support processes; budgeting and marketing. Moreover, structural reorganization has made it increasingly possible for other interest groups with different agendas outside the university to reach in and effect changes that reflect their own interests and those of wider political and economic communities. Employers directly influence the knowledge curriculum, as the content and orientation of professional courses is prescribed by external professional bodies working in collaboration with private service providers to offer professional accreditation. Global media and IT companies directly shape conditions of teaching and learning through the design of applications and online environments that rapidly become indispensable to the flexible learning required in the modern age. Developments of this kind, as we have argued elsewhere (Goodfellow and Lea 2007), can serve to conflate aspects of pedagogy with administrative and managerial activity, concealing, at the same time, critical differences between the social practices of different institutional communities.
