The politics of community: challenges in digital education

Abstract

We compare and contrast two paradigms of the digitalisation of HE. One is the British Government‐sponsored University for Industry (Ufi) which is based on a distributed campus with multiple hubs connecting individual puchaser‐learners to HE providers. This is contrasted with a sociable paradigm, based at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC). The first is based on an isolating and less empowering conception, alienating the learning from the community. The second aims to socialise the learning in the community of practice. The UWIC GROWTH network project underpins a regenerative project for SMEs in South Wales. It is seeking to facilitate a self‐organising, stakeholder‐community of SMEs committed to economic regeneration and capital anchoring in the South Wales area and is funded by the EU. We also refer to the EU‐sponsored Intelligent Information Interfaces (I³) project to demonstrate an alternative, sociable use of ICT.

Citation

Cockburn, T., Treadwell, P. and Cockburn‐Wootten, C. (2001), "The politics of community: challenges in digital education", Campus-Wide Information Systems, Vol. 18 No. 5, pp. 187-194. https://doi.org/10.1108/10650740110408517