What Does the ‘Postdigital’ Mean for Education? Three Critical Perspectives on the Digital, with Implications for Educational Research and Practice

This article contributes to debates about how to respond to the changing profile of Higher Education (HE) students, and the marketisation of HE, by challenging prevailing views about student engagement, in order to develop learner-centric and inclusive pedagogies which are relevant to the twenty-first century. The concepts of 'participatory culture' and 'co-creativity' are often associated with the digital world in which the current generation of students have grown up. But it is a mistake to assume that some learning styles are inherently more participatory than others: participation is not an effect of the medium or form, (analog vs digital), or the space (actual vs virtual), or the mode of interaction a (face-to-face vs networked) through which the learner participates it is an effect of the practices involved. Students engage with a complex network of both digital and analog texts and spaces, and it is this postdigital hybrid setting within which student engagement takes place. Marketisation provides an opportunity to actively demonstrate our commitments to student-centredness and inclusive practice, by transcending the binary opposition between 'Student as Partner' and 'Student as Consumer' and recognizing that students are learner-consumers, and allowing students' diversity to drive innovation, rather than continuing to disempower students by bolstering practices which privilege some learning styles above others, informed by the assumption that innovation is technology-led.

Section: Higher Education Studentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing Inclusive Pedagogies in HE through an Understanding of the Learner-Consumer: Promiscuity, Hybridisation, and Innovation

Partington

2020

“…The metrics that feed into institutional league tables and performance management of individuals are also facilitated by digital technologies. For these reasons, the advice offered by Knox (2019) to use the concept of the postdigital condition 'to highlight the need for educational practice and research to pay more attention to the ways digital technologies are shaping the core of education' (358) is a valuable one.…”

Section: Hyper-competition Performance Management and Relations Of Dmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mass Higher Education in England—a Success Story?

Welch

2020

The expansion of the UK higher education that began in the mid-1980s is considered to have transformed an elite system into a mass one. Student numbers tripled between 1980 and 2010 and opportunities for advanced study were extended to an increasing proportion of the population. However, the expansion was not fully funded by the state and both students and staff have, in different ways, covered the shortfall. This article will outline how this happened, indicate some of the detrimental effects on those who study and work within the current system and suggest some ways in which academics can challenge institutional practices that damage individuals and the educational services they provide. The title of the article refers to England rather that the UK because the details of policy, for example on tuition fees, vary across the four nations of the UK. In addition to academic articles and reports, the article draws on the author's own experience of more than 40 years as a higher education teacher, trades union activist and supporter of widening access to higher education.

“…Because digitalization is no longer supplemental or marginal, but is now at the driving center of education, such issues are central. Knox (2019) contributes here to the thinking about technology against and after capitalism.…”

Section: Creativity As Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

The Sublation of Digital Education

Malott

2019

In this paper, I argue that teachers' efforts to defend education against reactionary forms of digitalization and from complete automation should be supported by progressives. At the same time, efforts aimed at creatively transforming or sublating digitalization in non-deterministic ways to forge new pedagogical projects should also be enthusiastically engaged. Drawing on Marx's conception of sublation is crucial since it represents the process through which an aspect of something is overcome while other aspects of it are preserved in an altered form. Because sublation occurs both within entities as they develop and out of entities as they are negated, I contend that sublating digitized education both within capitalism and beyond capitalism should be pursued simultaneously.