Chris Bigum

Aliens in the Classroom

The impact and implications of the new information technologies as new intensities of media culture have only recently begun to register in mainstream educational theory and practice. This can be usefully considered in terms of the relationship between education and postmodernism. The paper explores concepts and images arguably peculiar to these new technocultural conditions, with reference specifically to educational crisis, alienation, contemporary youth culture, and technology. The hypothesis is that quite different youth and student subjectivities are currently forming out of the relations and practices of the new information technologies, and hence radical shifts are required in the social and educational imagination regarding young people, schooling and popular culture.

Marketing education in the postmodern age

This paper demonstrates that Australian public education is taking up a series of market identities and raises a number of selected matters that caused us concern as we both surveyed the field and the available critical literature and considered the social justice issues which are raised by markets in education. These matters are, first, the inadequacy of current conceptual, frameworks for categorizing various developments and, second, the relative blindness of commentators to the connections between the growth of markets in education and certain wider cultural as opposed to economic shifts. It seems to us that some more recent forms of education markets raise social justice issues that the literature has either not engaged or has engaged in a rather restricted manner. We will identify some of these in the process of exploring the possibilities which theories about postmodernity provide both for explaining the rapid momentum and acceptance of the market lexicon in education in Australia and elsewhere and ...

New education in new times

This paper is concerned with ‘new times’, new policies for education in Australia and the new issues that they generate for education. More particularly, the papers focus is upon the various educational forms that have emerged now that governments have let the market ‘genie’ out of the bottle. It identifies particularly those market forms to which information and communication technologies are integral and a range of ways in which education, markets and such technologies are coming together. In so doing, it offers a general sociological framework within which to understand these developments and a specific conceptual framework to assist in categorising such new educational forms.

Landscaping on Shifting Ground: Teacher Education in a Digitally Transforming World.

For almost three decades, the landscape of teacher education has been modestly shaped by the exploration of practices that made use of what were, at the time, current instances of computing and communication technologies (CCTs). More broadly and importantly however, the deployment of CCTs globally has, over the same time period (1980–2008), supported a reshaping of the planets social, economic and political circumstances in which all forms of education operate. Despite the enormity of these shifts the focus in teacher education has remained largely at site, reflecting a similar focus in schools. In fact, the patterns of adaption and response in teacher education to each new instance of high‐tech product are now quite predictable. Thus, while teacher educations engagement with CCTs can be mapped as a kind of minor landscaping, a process which attends more to appearance than substance, it is landscaping effectively premised upon a stable geography, one that resembles that of thirty years ago. This paper explores the changed and changing geography of a world heavily shaped by the ongoing deployment and use of more and more powerful CCTs. The analysis suggests that if we continue to attend only to landscaping, teacher education will be at risk of being terraformed.

Literacy, technology and the economics of attention

This article is based on aproject aimed at generating practicalsuggestions based on research findings abouthow new technologies might be used to enhanceL1 literacy attainment in disadvantagedsettings. The project involved designing,implementing and researching an innovativeapproach to curriculum and pedagogy using newdigital technologies in language and literacyeducation within classroom settings involvingsmall groups of ``disadvantaged learners. Thepaper reports activity and findings from one offour study sites. It focuses on four Grade 9boys seen by their teachers as troublemakersand at risk of failing in English. Theresearchers draw on current conceptual andtheoretical work associated with the emergenceof an Attention Economy theory to design acollaborative activity around constructing awebsite, and to identify and analyse positiveliteracy learning outcomes associated with thepedagogical approach taken. The authors showhow this new perspective on attention informs acritique of conventional approaches to schoolorganization and classroom learning, and how itcan be used to envisage alternative approachesto understanding and teaching students whodisplay literacy learning difficulties atschool.

Actor network theory and the study of online learning

This paper describes an approach to studying innovation and change that is taken from the field of Science and Technology Studies. Actor-network theory draws attention to the performative nature of the implementation of new technologies like quality systems and on1ine teaching. The theory posits that the world is not populated with entities that possess certain essences in and of themselves, but rather that the world is a texture of relations-a network which occasionally produces the effect of stabilised entities. We examine the consequences of producing durable forms of online teaching and quality assurance and argue that achieving durable performances requires a conformity to existing performances of a university thus reproducing current patterns of inequity.