This paper presents some of the findings from a recent project that conducted a virtual ethnographic study of three formal courses in higher education that use 'Web 2.0' or social technologies for learning and teaching. It describes the pedagogies adopted within these courses, and goes on to explore some key themes emerging from the research and relating to the pedagogical use of weblogs and wikis in particular. These themes relate primarily to the academy's tendency to constrain and contain the possibly more radical effects of these new spaces. Despite this, the findings present a range of student and tutor perspectives which show that these technologies have significant potential as new collaborative, volatile and challenging environments for formal learning

In recent years, 'technology-enhanced learning', or 'TEL', has become a widely accepted term in the UK and Europe for describing the interface between digital technology and higher education teaching, to a large extent taking the place of other recently popular terminologies such as 'elearning', 'learning technology' and 'computer-based learning'. Yet there has been little critique in the literature of the assumptions embedded within the terminology of TEL: rather it has been adopted as an apparently useful, inoffensive and descriptive shorthand for what is in fact a complex and often problematic constellation of social, technological and educational change. This paper subjects the term to a deeper analysis, drawing on insights from critical posthumanism, science and technology studies and Biesta's critique of the 'learnification' of education. In particular, it foregrounds the instrumentalisation of technology enacted by TEL, explores some of the problematic links between TEL and the philosophy of transhumanism, and critiques TEL for failing properly to interrogate its own ontological biases. The paper suggests that we need to be more careful with, and more critical of, the terminology we adopt to describe and determine the field.

An update to a provocative manifesto intended to serve as a platform for debate and as a resource and inspiration for those teaching in online environments. In 2011, a group of scholars associated with the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh released “The Manifesto for Teaching Online,” a series of provocative statements intended to articulate their pedagogical philosophy. In the original manifesto and a 2016 update, the authors counter both the “impoverished” vision of education being advanced by corporate and governmental edtech and higher education's traditional view of online students and teachers as second-class citizens. The two versions of the manifesto were much discussed, shared, and debated. In this book, Siân Bayne, Peter Evans, Rory Ewins, Jeremy Knox, James Lamb, Hamish Macleod, Clara O'Shea, Jen Ross, Philippa Sheail and Christine Sinclair have expanded the text of the 2016 manifesto, revealing the sources and larger arguments behind the abbreviated provocations. The book groups the twenty-one statements (“Openness is neither neutral nor natural: it creates and depends on closures”; “Don't succumb to campus envy: we are the campus”) into five thematic sections examining place and identity, politics and instrumentality, the primacy of text and the ethics of remixing, the way algorithms and analytics “recode” educational intent, and how surveillance culture can be resisted. Much like the original manifestos, this book is intended as a platform for debate, as a resource and inspiration for those teaching in online environments, and as a challenge to the techno-instrumentalism of current edtech approaches. In a teaching environment shaped by COVID-19, individuals and institutions will need to do some bold thinking in relation to resilience, access, teaching quality, and inclusion.

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“Authenticity in teaching” has been recognized as an important yet under-researched phenomenon. To gain greater insight into the meaning of authenticity in teaching in adult and higher education settings, the authors delved into some of the philosophical and educational literature on authenticity, giving particular attention, but not confining their review, to the work of Taylor, Heidegger, and Noddings. This study is one of “making sense of authenticity in teaching” in light of the conceptions of authenticity underlying the reviewed texts. Authenticity in teaching emerged as a multidimensional phenomenon, and the findings are presented in the form of multiple features associated with it. Inspired by Taylor's concept of horizons of significance and Palmer's notion of the subject-centered classroom, the authors further propose that one dimension of authenticity in teaching relates to educators' care for the subject matter and thus engaging students in genuine dialogue around ideas that matter.

This paper considers how online, distance students enact the space of 'the university', in the context of the rise of distance education within a traditional, 'elite' institution. Aiming to provide insight into how students translate into distance the space of a university which has traditionally had its basis in conventional on-campus education, it locates itself within the 'new mobilities' paradigm (Urry 2007), drawing on four different kinds of social space delineated by Mol and Law (1994, 2001) in order to analyse narrative and visual data generated with distance students at the University of Edinburgh. The paper shows that the material campus continues to be symbolically and materially significant for a group of students who may never physically attend that campus. Distance students, we find, need their own version of the 'spatial certainties' of bounded, campus space. Yet, in exploring the 'new proximities' of online distance education, we also argue that to define institutional and academic authenticity solely in terms of this bounded, 'regional' space is inadequate in the face of the other topologies which also come into play throughout distance students' accounts of what it means to be 'at' university.

This paper examines visions of 'learning' across humans and machines in a near-future of intensive data analytics. Building upon the concept of 'learnification', practices of 'learning' in emerging big data-driven environments are discussed in two significant ways: the training of machines, and the nudging of human decisions through digital choice architectures. Firstly, 'machine learning' is discussed as an important example of how data-driven technologies are beginning to influence educational activity, both through sophisticated technical expertise and a grounding in behavioural psychology. Secondly, we explore how educational software design informed by behavioural economics is increasingly intended to frame learner choices to influence and 'nudge' decisions towards optimal outcomes. Through the growing influence of 'data science' on education, behaviourist psychology is increasingly and powerfully invested in future educational practices. Finally, it is argued that future education may tend toward very specific forms of behavioural governance-a 'machine behaviourism'-entailing combinations of radical behaviourist theories and machine learning systems, that appear to work against notions of student autonomy and participation, seeking to intervene in educational conduct and shaping learner behaviour towards predefined aims.