Digital Technology has been promoted as a crucial element for the improvement of contemporary education, and one of the key challenges to face Higher Education all over the world. Universities are now awash with digital systems and devices, with the promise of improving the performance of students and educators by enhancing learning, boosting enrolment, retention and completion rates. Individuals everywhere increasingly engage in higher education along digital lines. In parallel, educational technology is now a multi-billion dollar industry – involving global technology corporations in local educational provision and practice. The need to ask critical questions of the relationship higher education and technology is more pressing than ever.
Against this background, this thematic series looks at the impact of digital technology on higher education through a deliberately critical lens. We are interested in moving beyond notions of technology as an instrumental issue that is neutrally implemented, and instead develop more nuanced analyses by problematizing the claims and assumptions surrounding higher education in a digital age.
Recent critical scholarship of technology has encompassed many study area and research topics. These include the understanding of new literacies and personal competencies under the view of media and arts education, philosophy of education, community education, critical pedagogy and activist education. There are also burgeoning critiques of technology within feminist and gender studies literatures, policy studies, and emerging interest in critical realist, socio-material and post-humanist directions.
The aim of this article collection to foreground these approaches in terms of discussions of higher education and technology.
Edited by: Linda Castañeda and Neil Selwyn
Editorial
More than tools? Making sense of the ongoing digitizations of higher education
Linda Castañeda and Neil Selwyn
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 2018 15:22
Published on: 14 May 2018
Research article
Magnetic and multistable: reinterpreting the affordances of educational technology
The concept of affordances has become a popular analytical tool in educational technology. The present article, however, argues that the current understanding of affordances does not adequately address the use...
Jesper Aagaard
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 2018 15:4
Published on: 1 March 2018
Research article
The hidden architecture of higher education: building a big data infrastructure for the ‘smarter university’
Universities are increasingly organized and managed through digital data. The collection, processing and dissemination of Higher Education data is enabled by complex new data infrastructures that include both ...
Ben Williamson
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 2018 15:12
Published on: 8 March 2018
Review article
A critical review of mobile learning integration in formal educational contexts
The use of digital technology in the learning process and teaching practices in formal teaching is highly dependent on the ability of teachers of introducing it without jeopardizing the richness of the classro...
Luís Francisco Mendes Gabriel Pedro, Cláudia Marina Mónica de Oliveira Barbosa and Carlos Manuel das Neves Santos
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 2018 15:10
Published on: 15 March 2018
Research article
The complicity of digital technologies in the marketisation of UK higher education: exploring the implications of a critical discourse analysis of thirteen national digital teaching and learning strategies
National strategies play a crucial role in framing how digital technologies are enacted in Higher Education (HE). This paper draws on some of the findings of a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of thirteen dig...
Morag Munro
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 2018 15:11
Published on: 29 March 2018
Research article
Personalisation in educational technology: the absence of underlying pedagogies
Personalization is one of the recurring themes in education and has occupied a large amount of specialised literature, since its appearance in the 1960s. A systematic exploration of the literature of the last ...
Antonio Bartolomé, Linda Castañeda and Jordi Adell
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 2018 15:14
Published on: 2 April 2018
Research article
Three paradoxes in the approach to educational technology in the education studies of the Spanish universities
The education studies of the Spanish universities are not alien to technological innovations, but their approach to them tends to be basically instrumental. Neuroscience’s contributions about the functioning o...
Joan Ferrés, Maria-Jose Masanet and Julio-César Mateus
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 2018 15:15
Published on: 4 April 2018