Year: 2015
Author: Roder, John, Lines, David, Naughton, Christopher
Type of paper: Abstract refereed
Abstract:
The dominant response to the question of relevance for universities in the era of emerging global knowledge economies has been widespread transformation of higher education along increasingly performative neoliberal lines.
Bill Reddings (1997) calls this the university in ruins, referring not only to the death of the humanities that has been the core of the liberal university, but the rise of accountability by way of the rhetoric of excellence. A related feature has been the widespread embracing of digital utopian futures within universities which are claimed to meet contemporary knowledge needs in the spaces making up our digital virtual world. In this paper my critique begin’s with a brief consideration of Heidegger’s dictum there is nothing technological about technology, shifting briefly to Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on the societies of control’ (1992). It does this briefly to set the scene for an alternative consideration of the university in the future, one that takes account of another contemporary trajectory looking toward what Peters and Roberts (2012) call ‘the virtues of openness’: open science; open systems; open access; open knowledge; open source, open education and open learning. I do this by exploring conditions for the playful university, drawing on a Deleuzean ontology, in particular his concept of the virtual, along with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage, of desire and of affect. This paper plugs the concept of the playful university into Deleuzean thought to see what it might produce, and hopefully to provoke capacities for experimenting with more rhizomatic processes and styles of educational encounter.
Open systems; educational future; materialist ontology; elearning
Bill Reddings (1997) calls this the university in ruins, referring not only to the death of the humanities that has been the core of the liberal university, but the rise of accountability by way of the rhetoric of excellence. A related feature has been the widespread embracing of digital utopian futures within universities which are claimed to meet contemporary knowledge needs in the spaces making up our digital virtual world. In this paper my critique begin’s with a brief consideration of Heidegger’s dictum there is nothing technological about technology, shifting briefly to Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on the societies of control’ (1992). It does this briefly to set the scene for an alternative consideration of the university in the future, one that takes account of another contemporary trajectory looking toward what Peters and Roberts (2012) call ‘the virtues of openness’: open science; open systems; open access; open knowledge; open source, open education and open learning. I do this by exploring conditions for the playful university, drawing on a Deleuzean ontology, in particular his concept of the virtual, along with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage, of desire and of affect. This paper plugs the concept of the playful university into Deleuzean thought to see what it might produce, and hopefully to provoke capacities for experimenting with more rhizomatic processes and styles of educational encounter.
Open systems; educational future; materialist ontology; elearning