The theory and practice of the virtual university: Working through the work of making work mobile

Minerva

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 359-373

  Pollock, Neil ^a   Cornford, James ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

^b NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0345682344     PISSN: 00264695     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1020977705523     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, 'How Things (Actor-Net)Work: Classification, Magic and the Ubiquity of Standards', Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1996), available at http://weber.ucsd.edu/∼gbowker/pubs.htm.
2. Tom Abeles, 'The Academy in a Wired World', Futures, 30 (7), (1998), 606.
3. Eli Noam, 'Electronics and the Dim Future of the University', Science, 270 (13), (1995), 247-249.
4. Abeles, op. cit. note 2;
5. Noam, op. cit. note 3.
6. See the recent report by the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals, The Business of Borderless Education (London: CVCP, 2000), and Robin Middlehurst, 'University Challenges: Borderless Higher Education, Today, and Tomorrow', Minerva, 39 (1), (2001), 3-26. Even in the most developed market - the United States - new for-profit universities such as the University of Phoenix constitute 'only 2% of degree enrolments' and 'publiclylisted educational services companies constitute only 3% by value of the billions of dollars spent on education and training in the US'; Yoni Ryan, 'The Business of Borderless Education: US Case Studies and the HE Response', paper presented to the CVCP conference, 'The Business of Borderless Education', 28 March 2000.
7. For instance, a widely circulated letter from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) spelt out the dangers of 'virtual and corporate universities' eating into the higher education market. The letter invited universities to contributie to a new 'e-University' project designed to meet this threat. The document is on HEFCE's website: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/ Pubs/CircLets/2000/cl104-00.htm.
8. See, for instance, Howard Newby, 'Higher Education in the 21st Century: Some Possible Futures', Discussion Paper (London: CVCP, 1999).
9. See, for instance, some of the projects mentioned in the special issue of Futures, 30 (7), (1998), and in Minerva, 39 (1), (2001).
10. Sue Johnston, 'Introducing and Supporting Change Towards More Flexible Teaching Approaches', in Alan Tait and Roger Mills (eds.), The Convergence of Distance and Conventional Education (London: Routledge, 1999), 39-50.
11. However, see Phil Agre, 'Infrastructure and Institutional Change in the Networked University', Information, Communication and Society, 3 (4), (2000), 494-507.
12. Critics include David Noble, 'Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education', Science as Culture, 7 (3), (1998), 355-368 and Langdon Winner's description of the 'Automatic Professor Machine', (1998) (available at http://www.rpi.edu/∼winner/apm1.html, downloaded 6 June 1999).
13. For a description of the actor-network approach, see Michel Callon, 'Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay', in John Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: a New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge Sociological Review Monographs, 1986), 196-229;
14. Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987);
15. John Law, Organising Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
16. This article forms part of a wider programme of research carried out in a number of different higher education institutions in the North-East of England over the past four years see James Cornford, 'The Virtual University is . . . the University made Concrete', Information, Communication and Society, 3 (4), (2000), 508-525;
17. Neil Pollock, 'The Virtual University as "accurate and timely information"', Information, Communication and Society, 3 (3), (2000), 349-365;
18. James Cornford and Neil Pollock, 'The University Campus as a "Resourceful Constraint": Process and Practice in the Construction of the Virtual University', in Mary R. Lea and Kathy Nicoll (eds.), Understanding Distributed Learning (London: Routledge, 2001), 170-181;
19. and Neil Pollock and James Cornford, 'The Theory and Practice of the Virtual University', Ariadne, 24, (2000) available at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue24/virtual-universities/intro.html.
20. Stuart Cunningham, Suellen Tapsall, Yoni Ryan, Lawrence Stedman, Kerry Bagdon and Terry Flew, 'New Media and Borderless Education: A Review of the Convergence between Global Media Networks and Higher Education Provision' (Canberra: Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Evaluations and Investigations Programme, Higher Education Division, 1998) (available at http://www.deetya.gov.au/-highered/eippubs/eip97-22/eip9722.pdf), 179.
21. For instance, a number of universities are currently working with computer suppliers to build administrative systems that offer 'self-service' access to students. See Neil Pollock and James Cornford, 'ERP Systems and the University as an 'Unique' Organisation', Critical Management Studies Conference, UMIST, Manchester, July 2001, available in the Electronic Journal of Radical Organisation Theory at http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconfere nce/2001/papers-education.asp
22. Theodore M. Porter, 'Information, Power and the View from Nowhere', in Lisa Bud-Friedman (ed.), Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business (London: Routledge, 1994), 217-230.
23. CVCP, The Business of Borderless Education, op. cit. note 5.
24. Latour, Science in Action, op. cit. note 13;
25. Law, Organising Modernity, op. cit. note 13;
26. see also John Krige, 'The 1984 Nobel Physics Prize for Heterogenous Engineering', Minerva, 39 (4), (2001), 425-443.
27. We do not want to be critical of the staff in the Learning Development Services Department who, despite limited resources, often showed remarkable ingenuity and resourcefulness during their work.
28. For a detailed elaboration of this point, see Agre, op. cit. note 10.
29. Ibid.
30. For instance, see Sarah Green and Penny Harvey's account of the different senses of 'connection' as it is discussed by technology advocates and, in contrast, how it might be understood elsewhere (as in anthropology or actor-network theory). The upshot of their argument is that, while technology can be effective at maintaining existing connections or relations between actors, it is less good at building new ones. Sarah Green and Penny Harvey, 'Scaling Place and Networks: An Ethnography of ICT "innovation" in Manchester', Internet and Ethnography Conference, University of Hull, 13-14 December 1999. For a similar argument, see also John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Chapter 8.
31. A. Rudinow Saetnan, 'Rigid Politics and Technological Flexibility', Science, Technology, & Human Values, 16 (4), (1991), 419-447.
32. Sarah Kiesler and Lee Sproull, Computing and Change on Campus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
33. Of course, what Tom is referring to as the 'centre' is, among other things, the tradition within universities of 'rule by committee'. For a good description of the committee system, see Geoffrey Lockwood and Jon Davies (eds.), Universities: The Management Challenge (Windsor: NFER-Nelson Publishing, 1985).
34. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
35. Phil Agre, 'Imagining the Wired University', paper presented at the Symposium on the 'Future of the University', University of Newcastle, September 2000.
36. See Cornford and Pollock, 'The University Campus as Resourceful Constraint', op. cit. note 13, for an extended discussion of this point.
37. Nina Wakeford makes a similar point in relation to a cyber-cafe. See Nina Wakeford, 'Gender and the Landscapes of Computing in an Internet Cafe', in Mike Crang, Phil Crang and Jon May (eds.), Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space and Relations (London: Routledge, 1999), 178-201.
38. See, for example, Noriko Hara and Rob Kling, 'Student Distress in Web-based Distance Education', Information, Communication & Society, 3 (4), (2000), 557-579;
39. Kate Stephens, 'Notes from the Margins: Library Experiences of Postgraduate Distance-Learning Students', in Alan Tait and Roger Mills (eds.), The Convergence of Distance and Conventional Education (London: Routledge, 1999), 124-140.
40. John P. Walsh and Todd Bayma, 'Computer Networks and Scientific Work', Social Studies of Science, 26 (3), (1996), 661-703.
41. Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, 'Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces', Information Systems Research, 7 (1), (1996), 111-134.
42. John Law and Michel Callon, 'Engineering and Sociology in a Military Aircraft Project: A Network Analysis of Technological Change', in Susan Leigh Star (ed.), Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 281-301.
43. Latour, Science in Action, op. cit. note 12.
44. Agre, op. cit. note 27.
45. James March, 'Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning', Organizational Science, 2 (1), (1989), 71-87.