Digital environments: monitoring changes to teaching

Abstract

The pressures, from outside and inside universities to digitize, to computerise, and ‘to go online’ continue to increase in pace. The rhetoric surrounding such pressures are often argued from a standpoint that positions technology as a ‘neutral tool’, a tool that will help make work more efficient and effective. The central thesis of this paper is that technology is best understood as fundamentally non-neutral and that various technological applications privilege certain ways of doing things, and exclude or restrict other ways. And further, that technology not only influences but can have a transformative effect on what the technology is used for, and on the work practices of those that use it. This paper draws attention to certain practices and changes in work practices in higher education, brought about, in part, or in whole, by the use of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs). In order to draw attention to these changed practices, this paper has been organised under four broad categories, namely: new pedagogical opportunities, changed practices, technology neutrality, and unintended effects.