Paradigms Lost: Academic Practice and Exteriorising Technologies

Abstract

Using Milton's Paradise Lost as metaphor, this article examines shifting positions of authority, and the role of technology, in higher education practice. As higher education becomes caught up in the performative agendas of globalised market rationalism, technology is mobilised in a specific way which sits uncomfortably with disciplinary culture, making academics complicit in a potentially problematic fashion. Learning technology serves a process of exteriorisation, rendering academic practices visible and calculable, and more amenable to the influence of management, to the authority of organisation, and less to tradition and the authority of the discipline. Trust and the ability to live with uncertainty and risk are displaced by audit; critique gives way to domestication. The more shadowy, private collegium must be open to survey within the transparent administrative universitas. Yet these same technologies remain potential sites of disciplinary resistance, or ‘culture jamming’ through the spaces they make available for contestability and interconnectivity.