The Infrastructure

Abstract

This chapter argues that networked learning depends on the existence of a variety of infrastructures and in particular the digital and networked technologies that support education. Some of these are supplied by universities and depend on institutional processes, but some are not institutionally bounded and they can be incidental to formal learning, but important to the informal processes that surround it. I have been part of two institution-wide change processes which involved significant modifications to the university’s infrastructures for learning. Both have involved dispersed decision-making in which ‘the’ university has proved to be a black box, assembled out of a variety of competing interests, material and social constraints and an array of loosely coupled technological systems. Some of the infrastructures involved in the changes were institutional in scale, but others involved external actors and their integration into university processes. If networked learning is to be an effective approach, it has to take into consideration those assemblages that are brought together in infrastructures because the interactions and connections that networked learning requires depend on the continuing construction and maintenance of an often invisible substrate of infrastructural activity. My argument is that infrastructures are important for networked learning, but more than that I argue that digital and network infrastructures, and an understanding of the issues they raise, are fundamental to understanding contemporary society and the world in which networked learning takes place. In this chapter, I propose the idea of Hybrid Infrastructures to encompass the emerging space of managed relationships between institutions and partly sequestered versions of universal services. The idea of hybrid infrastructure builds on the current use of the term hybrid to describe forms of cloud computing reliant on both public and private services. Current hybrid infrastructures are being used in education to provide student email, additional student services beyond core institutional provision and to provide locally hosted versions of cloud computing in ways that at least attempt to include and incorporate essential institutional requirements such as a rough equivalence in student experience and basic (legally required) levels of data protection.