Original article

doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2006.00204.x

The use of computer technology in university teaching and learning: a critical perspective
N. Selwyn
Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff, UK

Abstract

Despite huge efforts to position information and communication technology (ICT) as a central tenet of university teaching and learning, the fact remains that many university students and faculty make only limited formal academic use of computer technology. Whilst this is usually attributed to a variety of operational decits on the part of students, faculty, and universities, this paper considers the wider social relations underpinning the relatively modest use of technology in higher education. The paper explores how university use of computer technology is shaped into marginalized and curtailed positions by a variety of actors. From the writing of ICT at a national policy level through to the marginalization of ICT within the lived student experience, a consistent theme emerges where computer technology use is constructed in limited, linear, and rigid terms far removed from the creative, productive, and empowering uses which are often celebrated by educational technologists. In the light of such constraints, the paper considers how these dominant constructions of a peripheral and limited use of ICT may be challenged by the higher education community. In particular, it concludes by reecting on current critical thinking about how educational technologists can foster a more expansive and empowered use of computer technology within university settings. critical theory, ICT, Internet, higher education, university.

Keywords

Introduction

The potential of computer technologies to revolutionize university teaching and learning has long been celebrated by education technologists. Academic journals in the eld of educational technology such as JCAL regularly feature research focusing on the ability of technologies like the computer and the Internet to accelerate university students learning, enhance and democratize access to educational opportunities, and support interactivity, interaction, and collaboration (e.g. Draper & Brown 2004; Corlett et al. 2005; Oliver 2006). In short, the turn towards computer-based teaching and learning over the past 20 years is assumed to have
Accepted: 11 September 2006 Correspondence: Neil Selwyn, School of Social Sciences, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK. Email: selwynnc@cardiff.ac.uk

revolutionized and revitalized the university sector. Thus, stark ultimatums continue to be made by education technologists that universities must either transform or die in the face of technological progress (Bates 2004). This unerring faith in the higher education technical x (Robins & Webster 1989) is reected in the billions of dollars that are invested annually around the world in various aspects of university use of ICT (information and communications technology). Aside from the technology-enabled distance provision of higher education, much of this funding is currently being directed towards the on-campus application of ICTs. Indeed, expenditure on universities computer infrastructures has increased dramatically over the last decade as institutions attempt to blend ICTs into all aspects of face-to-face teaching and learning, as well as into students independent study. Lately, the burgeoning use
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of virtual learning environments such as WebCT, Blackboard, and Moodle has seen the concept of the university campus moving away from a bricks and mortarto a clicks and mortarmodel. In developed and developing countries alike, computer technologies have therefore become an icon of early 21st century higher education provision. Despite huge efforts to position computer technology as a central tenet of university education, the fact that many students and faculty make only limited formal academic use of ICT during their teaching and learning is less discussed by educational technologists. Belying the notion of the cyber-campus, the actual formal use of new technologies in undergraduate and graduate studies remains inconsistent and highly variable from course to course and institution to institution (Breen et al. 2001; Marriott et al. 2004). Classroom uses of potentially powerful information technologies are seen to often take the reduced form of mindless activities that do little to alter the expectations, assumptions, and practices of higher education teaching (Moule 2003). Indeed, the formal use of computer technologies in many areas of higher education could best be described as sporadic, uneven, and often low level (in stark contrast to the often imaginative and informal uses that students and faculty make of technologies like mobile telephony and other personal digital devices). This situation has prompted some commentators to dismiss ICT in higher education as nothing more than a servicearea of curriculum and pedagogy which many students and faculty are reluctant to engage with in an active or sustained manner (Reffell & Whitworth 2002). There is therefore a growing need for the education community to account for the distinct digital disconnect between the enthusiastic rhetoric and rather more mundane reality of university ICT use. As is usually the case in educational debate, blame for this disparity has been most frequently attributed to decits of skills, motivation, and know-how on the part of students, faculty, and the educational institutions themselves (e.g. Keller 2005; Simmons et al. 2005). Yet this paper seeks to distance itself from these usual discourses of deciency and instead account for the (non-)use of ICT in higher education in more nuanced and systematic terms. In particular, it sets out to critically examine the social construction of higher education technology at its many different levels from the actions of government and commercial bodies through to the day-to-day lived

experiences of the student. As has been noted before, most writings on universities and ICT have tended to gloss over these social, economic, political, and cultural elements of higher education technology use which are often harder to isolate, identify, and discuss (Newson 1999). With this in mind, the present paper considers the wider social relations underpinning the integration of computer technology in universities and, it is hoped, therefore go some way to explaining the restrictive and decidedly nontransformatory nature of formal use of ICT in contemporary higher education.
Towards a critical perspective of higher education and technology

Adopting a more critical perspective on higher education and technology takes us beyond the immediate concerns and preoccupations of most educational technologists. As Torin Monahan (2005, p. 8) puts it, rather than asking questions of do computers work? we are instead concerned with asking what social relations do they produce? Here, then, we can draw upon three decades of studies of the social construction of technology (SCOT) which have sought to document the complex network of competing interests, agendas, and power formations that underlie the seemingly straightforward production of hardware and software for domestic, scientic, and business markets (e.g. MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985; Russell & Williams 2002). This shift in questioning involves consideration of a wide range of stakeholders and inuences which are not immediately apparent when observing computer use in the classroom, computer lab, or student hall of residence. Indeed, it presupposes a complex layering to any implementation and use of education technology, from software developers, programmers, and marketers in the commercial IT sector down to individual university institutions, their departments, faculty, and students. At all points along this analytical pathway we therefore need to consider the roles of these different actors in subtly (and not so subtly) shaping what ends up constituting university ICT. Yet we can also utilize the theoretical perspective of Critical Theory and a lineage of work on technology and society spanning from the Frankfurt School to the more recent work of authors such as Andrew Feenberg (1991, 1999). This view of technology and education is sympathetic to the SCOT approach yet attempts to look
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beyond the often avowedly microdescriptive SCOT accounts of technology and emphasizes the overarching political, economic, cultural, and social imperatives of capitalist society which come to bear on any application of technology. By combining these critical and Critical Theory perspectives on technology, we can therefore set out a wide-ranging picture of the construction of higher education and ICT by a host of macro-, meso-, and microlevel actors which are often unseen in their inuence. As Bakardjieva (2005, p. 7) reasons, we need to set ourselves the task of identifying social relations that remain beyond the everyday horizon of the thinking and acting subject, but are nevertheless crucial in determining the limits and possibilities in her thinking and acting. Only by identifying the full range of these underlying relations and structures can we hope to identify a basis for meaningful and sustained change. From this background we can now go on to consider how computer use in higher education is being shaped into an increasingly restricted set of positions by a number of key actors and stakeholder interests. As we shall discuss in the proceeding sections of the paper, from the construction of ICT at a national policy level through to the place of computer use within the wider student experience of university life, a consistent theme emerges where higher education computer use is constructed in limited, linear, and rigid terms far removed from the creative, productive, and empowering applications which are often promoted by proponents of education technology. In particular, we briey consider four main levels of shaping: government concerns with global economic competitiveness; the commercial interests of the for-prot information technology (IT) industry; the new managerial concerns of university administrations; and the lived experience of university students. This is by no means an exhaustive inventory of actors and inuences, but it serves to illustrate the complex wider construction of computer technology use in higher education. We have, for example, neglected purposely the pedagogic practices and concerns of university faculty, as these have tended to dominate most previous discussion of ICT and higher education. Our deliberate focus on inuences outside of the classroom can, we hope, then be used to identify some hidden reasons underlying the apparent paucity of ICT use on the ground in universities and therefore provide a starting point for alternative suggestions for future change.
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The economic concerns of government

We rst turn to the government-level concerns of politicians and policy makers. National governments (and indeed supranational unions such as the European Union) exert a substantial level of control over the nature and form of publicly and privately run universities through formal policy making, direct and indirect funding, as well as other forms of support and coercion. Whereas the nature of some of these political concerns can be purely practical, more often than not there is a distinct strategic element to higher education policy making. In particular, the exponential expansion of higher education systems in many developed countries over the last 20 years has been rmly driven by a perceived political need to respond to the needs of the emerging knowledge-based economy and therefore redene the university institution in light of the new demands of a globalized economic competitiveness (Urry 2002). In contrast to their elitist origins, the latter half of the 20th century saw universities being appropriated by governments as a ready means through which to produce a mass of educated and competent citizens who could also double as highly skilled, highly employable workers for knowledge economies (Daniel 1999). Thus, within contemporary higher-education policy making, the logic of the technology-driven global economy plays a driving role, not least in capitalizing upon the function of the university in producing the levels of human capital required for countries to ensure their global economic competitiveness. Indeed, university sectors in many countries are being compelled by their governments to provide the labour market with cohorts of information-literate and techsavvy graduates to drive (and be driven by) 21st century capitalism. Of course, such macro-economic shaping of technology and higher education could be said to contribute to a particular form of higher education ICT provision and pedagogy. For instance, the political privileging of ICT skills as a positional good both for national economic competitiveness and individual graduate employability has inevitably led to an approach to ICTs in terms of learning about computer technology rather than through computer technology. As Stahl (2004, p. 159) describes, this inuence on ICT provision in many university departments culminates in a distinctly tool-box model of technology use:

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Most universities today offer some kind of introduction to computers and that usually includes an introduction to the standard software used in business, namely Microsoft Ofce. This sort of education is especially suited for automation and e-teaching [but] automatically raises the questions regarding who determines what is taught, what the standards are, what the aim is.

As Stahl intimates, there are a number of moral, as well as pedagogic, concerns with the construction of ICT in these economically orientated ways. First, students are argued to be directed towards very limited forms of technology use based around the transferable technical skills and operational know-how deemed useful in future employment. This can be seen as mitigating against the more novel, expansive, creative, and unstructured forms of technology use believed by many education technologists as lying at the heart of empowering the individual user and learner. Moreover, the base assumption that there is an insatiable demand from employers for knowledge workers boasting a range of high-tech skills is being increasingly questioned. Recent studies have suggested that graduates are perhaps lacking most in social and interpersonal skills rather than technological know-how (Taylor 2006). It has therefore been argued that university graduates are facing labour markets where overarching personal skills and qualities are more vocationally valued than any specic ICT ability (i.e. Hesketh 2000; Mason 2004). From this background, the technological training of university students may well not be of much vocational use, let alone of educational merit.

The commercial concerns of IT vendors

Aside from these issues of political economy, we should also consider how private sector interests shape the use of technology in universities. Education technologists often overlook the fact that the design, production, and sale of education technology is almost wholly dependent on commercial interests, most notably in the form of the many transnational, national, and local IT companies responsible for the supplying of computer hardware, software, and content. The for-prot sector also plays a key role in the more subtle selling of the concept of education technology in order to sustain demand for higher education use of ICT. In a more detached sense, business and industry interests enjoy privileged roles in shaping the governmental formation

of technology policy. In all, education technology is predicated upon the involvement of commercial IT rms and, it follows, that these private interests exert a profound shaping inuence on education technology. Indeed, commercial interests are implicit in higher education technology use in a number of pervasive ways above and beyond equipping campuses with computers and cabling. In terms of the direct selling of products, many universities allow private rms to broker schemes where students can either purchase or lease laptop computers at subsidized rates. Similarly, most software and hardware vendors provide student versions of their products to be sold by universities at subsidized prices. Commercial interests are also inherent in the design and development of the software used to drive ICT-based teaching and learning. Many university courses are administered and presented via highly structured virtual learning environments, whilst most lectures are reliant on so-called slideware computer programs developed for business presentations such as Microsofts ubiquitous PowerPoint application. Thus, university campuses represent a signicant and potentially lucrative market within which the IT industry operates. From a neoliberal perspective, the blend of public and private interests underpinning higher education ICT use works well for all parties. On the one hand, governments and university administrators get the technologysaturated campuses that they desire. Conversely, a strong relationship with the university sector makes sound commercial sense for the IT rms concerned. Given that prots in the IT industry are to be found mostly in adding value to existing products and chasing the high-margin, high-prot upper ends of the market, university students represent a convenient and captive cluster of high-tech, high-disposable-income consumers. Students themselves benet from subsidized exposure to the tools they will encounter and the skills they will require in the world of graduate employment. Market forces are seen to achieve all these aims far more efciently than any alternative models of procurement such as centralist state-directed production of computer resources or the in-house production of software by individual universities. Yet there are a number of less benign aspects to the growing inuence of industry and commerce in shaping the higher education technology agenda in these ways. For example, an obvious concern is that the realpolitik of business mean that IT vendors have no sustained
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commitment to the public good of education technology above and beyond matters of prot and market share. Indeed, there is the suspicion that higher education is used as little more than a testing ground for second-rate or embryonic ICT products, with tax-payer subsidy . . . thereby partially offsetting their losses and the absence of any real market demand (Noble 2002, p. 83). The IT industrys concern with prot above educational matters could also be said to restrict higher education teaching and learning, with much computer-based teaching and learning in universities following very limited, business-orientated lines. This is perhaps most apparent in the promotion of Ofce applications and training environments developed for the business sector where the congured user for such products is not seen to be in the classroom but the boardroom. This leaves programs such as Blackboard and PowerPoint overloaded with the material-semiotic infrastructure of business (Fuller 2003, p. 160), and therefore demanding and dictating decidedly hierarchical and linear modes of technology use based around the (re)presentation and one-way distribution of information rather than any more creative or empowering use of ICT. As Clegg et al. (2003, p. 49) conclude, much ICT-based learning therefore merely mirror[s] simple information giving functions valued in the business world for their efciency and clarity. Thus, students exposure to ICT throughout their university courses rarely progresses beyond the PowerPointlessness of Ofce applications, which reduce scholarship to being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials (Tufte 2003, n.p.), whilst routinely disrupt[ing], dominat[ing], and trivializ[ing] [the] content of teaching and learning (Guernsey 2001, p. 1).
The managerial concerns of university administrations

From just these two examples, we can already see how ICT use in universities is shaped by different actors with different motives and rationales. In this sense, we also need to contextualize university ICT use in terms of the mounting administrative and managerial pressures that higher education institutions face in relation to recently massied forms of higher education. Indeed, the increasing use of ICT in universities over the past 30 years is entwined with a parallel transformation of the general modus operandi of universities.
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Since the 1980s, universities in most developed countries have found themselves having to cater for burgeoning numbers of students, whose enrolment has generally not been matched by correspondingly increased funding or resourcing. As previously discussed, these changes have derived, in part, from governmental concerns over global economic competitiveness and the need for expanded numbers of graduate-level knowledge workers. Yet these political concerns have had profound effects on the day-to-day operation of universities themselves. Higher education systems in most countries have faced increasing nancial accountability and pressure to perform efciently and protably. There has, for example, been a creep towards the performance-based funding of higher education institutions, based around through-put and out-put criteria such as graduate placement in employment, number of degrees awarded, and student retention rates. All told, the guiding concerns of higher education administrators have been substantially recast along the lines of new managerialism, i.e. discourses of management derived from the for-prot sector based around issues of efciency, effectiveness, modernization, rationalization, and the ultimate reduction of spending costs (Deem 2004). This has given rise to a form of academic capitalism, with research and development, patent production, and other commercial ventures becoming core elements of the business of universities (Slaughter & Leslie 1997). Thus, universities have had to become more entrepreneurial in their approach (Clark 1998), not least in terms of nding effective ways of dealing with larger student numbers and running more complex organisations Deem (2004, p. 292). New technologies have therefore been welcomed as a ready solution to many of the issues faced by new managerial university administrations. First and foremost, ICTs have become a vital part of the market branding of higher education institutions, bestowing a hi-tech veneer onto universities often low-tech practices. The use of computer-based and computerassisted teaching is seen to increase and ease universities processing of students, without demanding additional investment in costly physical resources such as classrooms or staff. As Noble (2002, p. 29) observes, computer technologies therefore lend their institutions a fashionable forward-looking image [whilst] reducing their direct labour and plant

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maintenance costs. Computer technologies are also central to the entrepreneurial pursuits of higher education institutions, not least in reaching hitherto physically inaccessible but potentially lucrative markets of overseas students. In a similarly entrepreneurial vein, the digitalization of teaching leaves universities with a legacy of electronic resources which are indenitely replicable, scaleable, and saleable with intellectual property rights crucially transferred from the tutor to their employers. In all these instances, the ICTsustained massication of student numbers is a key element of the creation and maintenance of a commercial infrastructure which is now at the heart of the effective and competitive university sector. For some critical commentators, these shifts towards technology-based effectiveness represent yet another element of the irrevocable movement of higher education away from its traditional ideological functions of promoting reason, culture, and enlightenment (Readings 1996). One could argue, for example, that the new managerial application of ICTs has little concern with enhancing the quality of higher education (see Hirschheim 2005). Therefore, a model of ICT use based on student throughput and market reach could be seen as part of the wider dumbing down and a lowering of standards in contemporary higher education (Leathwood & OConnell 2003), with only secondary consideration given to the pedagogical and professional concerns that guided early experimentation and innovation (Hamilton & Feenberg 2005, p. 304). There is also an argument that this inexorably leads to depersonalized and dehumanized forms of higher education, and an overall factory model of university education which runs the risk of atrophying learning opportunities whilst dehumanizing both instructors and students (Cooley 1999). Thus, far from becoming uid sites of learner-centred discovery, the 21st century e-university could be said to merely propagate the ongoing automation of higher education and, in the nal analysis, represent little more than a digital extension of Robert Reids diploma mills of the mid-20th century (Noble 2002). As Rudy Hirschheim (2005, p. 101) concludes,
if the internet leads to a more standardised, minimalist product targeted for a mass market, this will further box in and dumb down education, resulting in a system that does not support the endeavours of superior scholars and thinkers.

The strategic concerns of students

Our nal level of analysis is that of the individual students themselves a curiously neglected element of the education technology equation given that students are the ultimate end users and beneciaries of ICT-based in university teaching and learning. It is particularly revealing to consider university students in terms of how they approach academic ICT use within their dayto-day experience of being a student. Indeed, as Gewirtz et al. (1995) argue, we must locate any analysis of higher education within the lived experiences of individual students and therefore understand the act of being a student in social, economic, political as well as educational terms. In this sense, it is clear that there is a lot more to the job of being a student then learning with (or without) computer technology not least students juggling of a number of academic and nonacademic demands during their university careers, which place them in various conicting roles such as learner, employee, socialite, and debtor. Indeed, there is a complex interplay of forces which come to bear on the current generation of students, and these should be seen as key factors in students effectiveness in doing university. Central to this challenge is the consistent friction between academic success and nancial survival (see Hesketh 1999). Despite their apparent afuence, increasing percentages of income are being borrowed by students against future earnings, in turn compounding the pressure to gain a good grade and therefore increase their chances of gaining a good job. As with the universities in which they study, individual students have been forced to become more entrepreneurial in their negotiation of the massied higher education landscape some more successfully than others. This fragmented and sometime fractious nature of student life can therefore shed new light on the often marginal place of computer-based learning. Instead of being technophobic or lacking adequate access, many students could be instead seen as savvy but pressured consumers of higher education who often engage with their studies in ruthlessly pragmatic, strategic, and tactical ways. This can be seen in terms of a number of short, medium, and longer-term issues with regard to ICT-based learning. For example, from a short-term perspective students reading of ICT must be set against the consequential validityof assessment, i.e. the effect of the test or other
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form of assessment on learning and other educational matters (Boud 1995, p. 38). For many students, the peripheral role that ICT takes in the assessment demands of their university courses (besides the wordprocessing of essays and cursory searching of the World Wide Web) provides a clear strategic impetus not to make extensive use of ICT. As Knight (1995) argues that students can often view assessment as a moral activity by teaching staff, making it abundantly clear what is valued in their courses and by higher education in general. The fact that most university courses retain a focus on summative assessment and the culture of the gradetherefore shapes students approaches to learning in limited syllabus-bound ways (Norton et al. 2001). Thus, the timed paper-and-pencil examination, the practical lab test, and class test all mitigate against extensive use of ICT. Similarly, students medium-term perspectives on successfully completing their degrees and being awarded a reasonable classication could be seen as equally as ICT-free. In the relatively short life of a modular degree scheme built around continuous assessment, there is simply no time to develop new skills at the risk of jeopardizing work and, ultimately, nal examination grades and degree classications. Given the purely incidental and conicting role that ICT plays in their degree courses, many students have little medium-term incentive to continue to use ICTs and are compelled instead to adopt low-level approaches to studying:
many learners at different times tend to adopt either a surface approach to their study, characterised by a focus on rote learning, memorisation and reproduction, a lack of reection and a preoccupation with completing the task; or a strategic approach, characterised by a focus on assessment requirements and lecturer expectations, and a careful management of time and effort, with the aims of achieving high grades. (Mann 2001, p. 7, emphasis in original)

ICT-saturated school environments, many students are condent in meeting the levels of ICT skill expected by employers and in their abilities to full these expectations as and when required. Crucially, this is often not seen as being contingent on sustained use of ICT during their years of university education.
Identifying the political, economic, and social precedents of higher education technology use

Even in terms of students longer-term perspective of gaining graduate employment and establishing careers, ICTs could be said to play a peripheral role. As their degree progresses, students fast become portfolio people (Wright et al. 1999), driven by building their resumes, personal development plans, and the like. In contrast to the views of politicians and university administrators, ICT is often seen by students as being a basic, but not ultimately essential, element of developing their marketability to employers. After 15 years in
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So far in this paper we have argued that only if we place ICT within the different contexts where higher education is politically and socially constructed can we begin to understand the ways in which computer technologies are eventually used and not used. Of course, in making these points we should remain wary of being overly macro determinist in our analysis. There is a danger of crudely caricaturing higher education as simply a servant to the demands of the global economy and blindly following the unforgiving logic of contemporary exible capitalism. As is constantly pointed out throughout the mainstream ed-techliterature, there are a host of individualized, psychological, and educational factors also at play here whose inuence on university computer use cannot be denied or discounted completely. Neither are we seduced into being too socially determinist in our analysis, instead remaining mindful that all the social processes identied in this may well inuence but do not in themselves determine the nature and use of an education technology, which remains socio-technical in nature. Thus, we are not claiming that computer technologies are purely the embodiment of wider social relations and therefore have no technological form, function, or merit. Neither are we denying the many instances of technological good practice which abound in university settings around the world. Yet we are asserting that when celebrating the educational potentials of ICTs, educational technologists should remain mindful that whilst technological progress may well achieve advances of general utility such as ease, convenience and speed, the concrete form in which these advances are realised is determined by the social power under which they are made (Bakardjieva 2005, p. 15). This, we argue, leaves the political, economic, and social precedents of higher education technology use deserving of fuller consideration by the education technology community than has been the case to date.

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Indeed, in focusing on the social relations of university ICT and mapping its links to the political economy of higher education, we have been able to fashion a powerful set of reections on education in the era of the globalized knowledge economy. Throughout the different levels of our analysis a recurring observation has been that when the focus of higher education shifts from one of educational concern to grappling with the perceived demands of globalzation, market economics, industry, and commerce, then the net result is a heightened straight-jacketing and restructuring of universities and those within them. Thus, we have seen how a variety of noneducationally focused values, ideologies, and power relations are hardwired into higher education computer use with varying effect on the ground. In particular, we have outlined an insidious process of fragmented centralization imbued within the current higher education ICT agenda often purporting to decentralize control to the learner whilst actually advancing more subtle forms of centralized social control over all elements of the higher education system. Thus, it could be said that ICTs are being shaped by a number of vested interests whose guiding motives are to more efciently and effectively play the game of higher education a game which is now based upon a set of new managerial rules. Thus, policy stakeholders approaches to using ICTs are predicated upon wider strategies of making the most of universities in their guise as instruments of economic growth and social inclusivity (Pelletier 2004, p. 11). Commercial actors are primarily concerned with positioning themselves for short-term gains in the higher education ICT market whilst also securing the longer-term capture of highincome graduate consumers of their products. Higher education institutions are primarily appropriating ICTs as technologies of discipline and rationalization in the face of mounting new managerial pressures. This leaves those in the classroom with a similar set of strategic concerns. The crucial point here is that all these actors pursue such self-interested aims for very good and sometimes laudable reasons. Thus, the fact that computer technologies are not being deployed in ways that are educationally or technically desirable is often not due to a set of deciencies, barriers, or misunderstandings which can be easily overcome. Instead, the awed use of computer technologies is, by and large, a product of the wider gameof higher education and the strategic

interests of those who play it. This is perhaps best illustrated in our analysis of the lived experience of students, who can be said to exercise a very considered, rational, and reexive (non)engagement with university-based ICT. In this sense, as Robins and Webster (1999, p. 202) contend, in critically engaging with ICTs in this way, students are displaying little more than the requisite for the adaptability and opportunism demanded in the dauntingly exible world of informational capitalism. Laudable or not, these shapings of computer-based teaching and learning in higher education result in a number of what we would consider undesirable outcomes. This is evident both in the language of the new managerial application of technology and in the language of those who contest it. Thus, we have seen how the perceived advantages of ICT are described in terms of efciency, effectiveness, modernization, and rationalization. We have similarly seen how the disadvantages are portrayed in terms of immorality, dehumanization, atrophy, disenchantment, and alienation. We would contend that none of these qualities could be considered as forming the basis of an enhanced, emancipatory, and enlightening form of higher education provision. There is a danger therefore that the recent haste to implement computer technologies in higher education teaching and learning has caused many educationalists and technologists to lose sight of the guiding principles and underlying purposes of university education. In this sense, we can see how education technology is not a new or neutral blank canvas (as is disingenuously claimed by many) but a site of intense conict and choice. Thus, in continuing to pursue the implementation of computer technologies in higher education settings, educators are not making technical choices but ideological and political ones. Therefore, the key issue that we nally need to address in our analysis is that of the potential for change. To what extent is the shaping of university ICT use closed before it reaches the campus (Bijker et al. 1987), or to what extent do these dominant constructions of new managerial forms of computer technology use remain open to being challenged, recontextualized, and reshaped along more equitable and educationally desirable lines? In other words, we need to consider what steps (if any) are required to foster a more expansive and empowered use of computer technology within future cohorts of university students and faculty. Are there nontraditional agencies and
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possibilities for a wider grass roots involvement in the social shaping of higher education technology or are we simply facing a predetermined and disempowered situation where the space left for practitioners in higher education is either to embrace the new media enthusiastically or to stand aside and watch its inevitable unfolding (Clegg et al. 2003, p. 39)?
Engineering a critical renaissance of higher education technology use?

Given the wealth of pessimistic evidence that we have covered thus far, it is tempting to concur with Cleggs rather gloomy conclusion that the limited implementation of computer technology in higher education is inevitable and fast unfolding. Indeed, from a Critical Theory perspective it could be argued that the way technology is used in education and thereby contributes to its further commodication is, in the nal analysis, endemic in capitalism itself. If this is so, then nothing less than a wholesale re-engineering of the dominant capitalist economic system and its incentives will stand a chance of achieving change. This is a historically proven argument and one which we have much sympathy for. Yet it may be that the increased public engagement with and questioning of new ICTs such as the Internet offers some scope for a more equitable reconstruction of technology use in a public sphere such as higher education (Feenberg 1999). It may be that we are able to at least consider critical alternatives to an outright repudiation of technology and explore the opportunities (however, slight) for its reconstruction rather than vilication (Kellner 2001). It is in this spirit that we choose to conclude our discussion. Indeed, there has been a marked trend of late amongst critical observers of education technology to argue for a bottom-up recapturing and reconguring of the discourses surrounding higher education and ICT. Indeed, this prevailing spirit of optimism has prompted a number of critical scholars to take the present shortcomings of higher education computer use as a starting point from which to propose radically alternative models of technology use based on democratic and culturally diverse principles. For example, as Benson and Harkavy (2002) reason, technologies could well offer a chance for radically reinventing and saving the soul of the university in light of the changing global educational context. In other words, it is felt by a growing number of
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critical commentators that ICTs have the potential to be used for an epistemological and cultural updating and repositioning of the university away from the instrumental and homogenized model of the corporatized university and towards a global-cosmopolitan model of technology-driven higher education. Thus, many authors have been exploring ways in which universities can utilize old and new technologies to reinvent themselves as places of encounter for cultures and knowledges from across the world (Robins & Webster 2002, p. 322). Crucially, it is argued that these changes can be achieved by a reshaping of computer-based learning by those within the four walls of the university. This is seen to require a shift in focus from the representational capabilities of ICTs (i.e. their ability to represent commoditized informational delivery modes of higher education) to their more expansionist and relational potentials, not least the creation of an environment for social interaction between geographically and temporally distant users (Hamilton & Feenberg 2005, p. 108). This, it is argued, can move computer technologies beyond the limited and linear models and relationships of higher education as they are currently being articulated. Instead, the higher education community could themselves reshape computer technology along the lines of a networked, decentralized, and radically different form of university education:
there is now wide latitude for faculty intervention and participation in shaping the terms on which [ICT] will impact the academic labour process, the division of academic labour, and ownership of intellectual resources. It is now clear that online education will not destroy the university as we know it. Its future will be determined ultimately by the politics of the very institution it promised to replace only a few years ago. (Hamilton & Feenberg 2005, p. 117)

So what may a more decentred and transgressive model of faculty- and learner-shaped higher education computer technology look like? In pursuing this line of thinking, some authors have offered examples of radical reworkings of education technology which follow the interests of the academy rather than the economy. For example, universities have been urged to break free from the Microsoft/PC hegemony of technological procurement and turn instead to open-source software and hardware which are seen to offer increased exibility and control to tutors and students as well as facilitating

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communal models of collaborative creation in the direct shaping of the software being used for learning (Raymond 1998). As Van De Bunt-Kokhuis (2004, p. 269) contends, open source software like LINUX, might serve to democratize higher education and allow greater grassroots input. Students and tutors have been similarly encouraged to break open the black box of software code and modify software according to their own need and demands much as games modders do with video games (Kirkpatrick 2005). Similarly, it is suggested that local technologists strive to inuence the design of new buildings along more exible, networkable, and recombinant lines (Mitchell 1995). Heartening as it is believed that a more benign technology-driven future is within the grasp of practitioners and educationalists, we would contend that these reimaginings of university computer use are somewhat simplistic in the face of the many competing shaping interests which as we have seen also come to bear on higher education technology. In particular, these reworkings of university computer use along more emancipatory lines assume a political reworking of higher education far beyond the scope of wellintentioned activist educators. As such, these arguments merely mirror wider idealistic debates within the academic community over the possible future of higher education. For example, in proposing alternatives to the ruins of the contemporary university, authors such as Readings (1996) have similarly urged the university to become a locus of dissensus, with teaching and learning becoming increasingly decentred and transgressive. Yet, in this global-economic, new managerial climate of higher education, such notions of grass-roots, practitioner-led change are ambitious at best a point conceded by those proposing such conclusions. As Robins and Webster (2002) acknowledge, the establishment of the technology-led global cosmopolitan university would, at best, involve a protracted struggle. We would go further than this and argue that without a wholesale societal and cultural rethinking of what higher education is and what interests higher education should serve in a capitalist society, then such discussions over the potential reshaping of ICTs are ultimately destined to fail. Indeed, those seeking to reimagine the use of computer technologies in university teaching and learning along more equitable and democratic lines should recognize that the current new managerial-led model of

higher education ICT use will be an incredibly difcult paradigm to alter. Government policy concerns over global economic competitiveness are unlikely to be easily realigned. The entrenched for-prot interests of the IT industry will be hard to shift or counter, with IT rms unwilling to leave the higher education marketplace without a ght. Whilst university faculty may be keen to embrace a destructured exchange of ideas and debate, their students may be less willing to indulge in the luxury of learning for learnings sake committed as they are to entering the less-cosseted and idealistic world of employment. Thus, unless the entire nature of contemporary higher education is radically realigned, then we would argue that there is little hope that the narrow shaping of academic computer technology use described in this paper can ever be meaningfully challenged. Thus, our conclusion is that the only way to achieve meaningful change in the ways in which computer technologies are used in higher education is to strive to engineer a radical overall and wholesale restructuring of universities and university education. Rather than tinkering around the technological edges, education technologists would be best served by lobbying for radical alterations to the way we structure and organise our systems/institutions/processes of lifelong learning ( Fathaigh 2002, n.p.). Whilst there is a techno-romantic tendency amongst critical commentators to focus on the micropolitics of technological resistance and reshaping, we would therefore argue that more sustained change can only arise from a concentration on the micropolitics of non-technological education resistance. In this sense, it is the non-technological politics rather than the technological practices of higher education which should now be of primary concern to education technologists. Instead of the cosy bipartisan political consensus which currently exists around the inherent benets of any investment in educational ICT, politicians and policymakers should be lobbied to think more carefully about their current skillsdominated approach to education technology especially in light of the need for more exible, reexive, creative, and intuitive users of technology in the global knowledge economy. Students (and their parents) can be encouraged to be more critical and politicized consumers of their higher education, actively opposing the increased automation and dehumanization of the student learning experience, instead
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of passively accepting and, at best, attempting to work around it. Teaching unions and other professional bodies can similarly challenge the de-professionalization of their members that much ICT use appears to entail. Individual universities can employ consumerist strategies of boycotting in order to leverage policy and product change, whereas the shareholders of IT companies can be made aware of the public benets (and likely increased protability) of fairly dealing with the educational marketplace. Levering such changes will, of course, be a monumental task and may well be doomed to fail given the dominant overarching structures of global capitalism which so dene higher education in contemporary society. Yet the sooner that these nontechnological issues are engaged with, then the sooner that the undoubted potential of computer technologies for higher education be realized.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

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