Digital Developments in Higher Education: Theory and Practice

Citation

Armstrong, C.J. (2002), "Digital Developments in Higher Education: Theory and Practice", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 36 No. 2, pp. 132-133. https://doi.org/10.1108/prog.2002.36.2.132.3

When presented with a new book to review, most people will first examine the contents, the index (maybe), illustrations, abstracts, the foreword, the cover or dust jacket and so on, before arriving at the papers that most interest them and then proceeding to the rest. This allows the reviewer some insights into the intent and audience, for example. Robbed by the publisher’s whim of the contextualising foreword and by editors’ choice of the same in their introduction (they set only a digital scene – quoting Bill Gates but also Lyotard – for higher education, before moving on to summarise each chapter), this reviewer moved on to the papers, still slightly in the dark!

I was particularly struck by a phrase used by Sharon Harvey who wrote of “the topic of higher education and how it is fundamentally changed by a semantic recasting of what constitutes ‘knowledge’ in an information age”. As the editors say in their introduction, “This sort of hyperbole warrants careful, critical scrutiny”. Harvey begins this section, predictably, with Toffler and Bell and ends a decade or so later – having glissaded past Fuller’s note that it is “truly perverse of celebrants of the Knowledge Society to declare that humanity is on the threshold of a new conception of knowledge” – with the acceptance that the recasting amounted to no more than a realisation that communication affords an easier means to create and acquire knowledge.

It is perhaps unfair to pick on one author in a short review of a collection of papers, but it struck me that the too‐casually suggested re‐definition of knowledge that turned out to be no more that a celebration of networked communication might typify the whole slim volume. After all, the acquisition of knowledge seems to be what this volume is all about. We are presented with a dozen so‐called international papers with no explanation of origin or provenance under the title, Digital Developments in Higher Education: Theory and Practice. Is this about digitisation or education? About information handling or teaching?

A little investigation reveals that education is the theme that binds together the papers and that the origin is antipodean, with only two papers from the USA and two from the UK. There is, however, no explanation of aim or intent. Are these conference papers or did the editors have some over‐arching message to communicate? We do not know.

On the whole, the papers are all well‐written and well‐supported discourses: half of them dealing with the theoretical, political or philosophical matters and half with the more pedagogic or practical. Because of my background, the most interesting paper was Peter Roberts’ excellent overview of scholarly publishing, but this is in no way to denigrate other authors. The volume seeks to address the means by which the latest technological developments may – or may not – drive forward learning. It tries to link the local with the global, and to examine issues of access and equity. The editors claim that the changing status of knowledge and the commercialisation of learning are issues that they address; what they do not do in any way is amplify this thesis that apparently underlies the volume and so make the contents easily accessible to the reader.