Technology-enhanced learning and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university

ABSTRACT

Neoliberalism is a global pedagogical project aimed at the dispossession of free time so that all of life becomes productive, and education is a central institutional means for its realisation. This project aims at marketising all of social life, so that life becomes predicated upon the extraction of value. In part the deployment of technologies, technical services, and techniques enables education to be co-opted as an institutional means for production and control. This occurs inside both formal and informal educational institutions and spaces, like universities and Massive Open On-line Courses, as one mechanism to offset the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and to re-establish accumulation. This pedagogic project also tends to recalibrate and enclose the roles of staff and students as entrepreneurial subjects, whose labour is enabled through technology. This is achieved through learning analytics, big data, mobility and flexibility of provision, and so on. At issue is the extent to which this neoliberal project can be resisted or refused, and alternatives described. This article will analyse the relationships between technology, pedagogy, and the critical subject in the neoliberal University, in order to argue for the use of technology inside a co-operative pedagogy of struggle. This demands that we ask what education is, before we ask what it is for, or the place of technology-enhanced learning in the university. The article considers whether it is possible to uncover ways in which education might be used for co-operation rather than competition, and what technology-enhanced co-operative education might look like?

KEYWORDS:

• Co-operation
• higher education
• neoliberalism
• technology-enhanced learning
• university

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Richard Hall is De Montfort University's Head of Enhancing Learning through Technology. He is a UK National Teaching Fellow and holds a Chair in Education and Technology. Richard is a Research Associate in the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University, and his research interests include: the idea of the University and radical alternatives to it; technology and critical social theory; resilient education and the place of co-operative practice in overcoming disruption in higher education; and the place of social media in the idea of the twenty-first century University. He writes at: http://richard-hall.org.

ORCID

Richard Hall http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1217-5102