In Australia and North America in particular, campus-based universities are acting quickly to digitise, computerise, go on-line and join the high-tech revolution. Academics are urged to make use of multimedia and the web as an alternative to face-to-face teaching, departments are urged to offer courses and subjects on-line, universities are urged to consider their futures as campus-based or virtual education providers, and national education sectors and systems are asked to consider their competitiveness, as communications and information technologies create a single global market for all existing institutionalised education, with few entry barriers to new providers.
Something worth watching is going on here. It is not just that university decision makers have belatedly made improvement of face-to-face teaching a high priority and are hopeful that technology will do it, or that the relative advantages of on-line and multimedia-based education are under sober consideration in selected contexts. Rather, many university decision makers seem to be rushing headlong to enrol high-technology to 'transform teaching and learning', and to 'revolutionise' education.1
Clearly, high technology is not meant as a simple improvement, but rather is seen as transformative. It is seen to pose a serious threat to traditional campus-based, face-to-face teaching and learning, and these threats and promises of violent change invoke both fear and excitement. Many stories of technologically driven reform and improvement are full of optimism, pioneering adventure and hope, and are also full of scorn for ineffectual and over-crowded lectures, inflexible timetables, elitist entry requirements, and authoritarian modes of teaching and assessment. Many stories are also sobered by a grim fatalism, adopted in the face of fearful technological and economic trends perceived to be beyond intervention.
Both the optimism and the fatalism are discursive threads that arise from and are framed by a determinist paradigm which casts technology as a driving cause and change as an effect. Particular technologies are thus said to have particular effects, and the question becomes one of defining and implementing appropriately designed and configured technologies to nurture particular and appropriate effects. That one may do this through careful attention to technical and instructional design gives cause for optimism and stories with happy endings; that technologically driven change is inexorable gives rise to fatalism and stories with threatening beginnings. Exciting stories that describe new frameworks of possibility, new ways to overcome difficulties and achieve desires are always welcome, even if the cause and effect plot makes for an overly linear narrative. But cautionary tales also have a place, and the following is such a tale.
The reader will note that this story is told in stark terms. There is only good and bad, black and white. The villain is entirely scurrilous and the victims are entirely romanticised. There are few nuances and no attempt at all at balance. The point is not to describe how things are, or how they will be, but to describe how fearful things can be.
The villain of the piece is the Virtual University, a fictive construction which brings together a myriad of digital communications and information processing technologies, imagined by beginning with extant prototypes (the Western Governors University,2 the Open University of Britain,3 the Canadian Virtual U,4 The California Virtual University,5 Price-Waterhouse-Coopers Virtual University,6 and others), and fleshed out by extrapolating from the technocentric fantasies of today's digital frontiersmen and women. In this story the Virtual University is contextualised against a background which highlights certain features of a still emerging social environment, and it derives its character, meaning and raison-d'être from its relation to this social environment. In this story therefore, the Virtual University ceases to play the role of cause and becomes an effect a material embodiment of certain social abstractions and values apprehensible through those abstractions and values.
However, whilst readable as an effect, the Virtual University also takes its existence as material practice; it is in the world and it acts in the world, and in that sense is a protagonist in the story. It not only exemplifies change, it also executes change. It is not simply an outcome of commodification, the rise and rise of markets, and so forth, it is a player making an active contribution to the constitution of commodification, the rise and rise of markets, and other aspects of its environment. As such it is deeply implicated in the social conditions in which it finds itself, at each end of production, both as an outcome and an input. It does not stand apart from that environment (impacting and impacted upon), but is embedded in and defined by a complex web of reflexive relations in which neither the social context nor the technologies in question occupy a permanent place of privilege, and where the identities and character of each bleeds into the other.
Before going further along this path it is probably best to get a clearer picture of the Virtual University. A brief sketch of the 'fictive reality' is called for.
The Virtual University
The first thing that might take one's attention about the Virtual University is that by and large it does not exist in any particular geographical location. It does not have a physical campus, grounds, buildings or a place on a map, and is not attended in body by any students or any staff. Instead of occupying a place in space, it has a 'place' in cyberspace, and all teaching, learning and assessment is mediated electronically, through digital communications and interactive multimedia technologies. The exception to this is where a physical campus and bodily co-presence offers significant added value to standard education in electronic mode. Examples of such physical campuses are prisons, health camps, drug-rehabilitation clinics, holiday resorts and field-sites of significance.
Looking back one might note that the Virtual University did not evolve entirely from traditional universities, but is an engineered hybrid tracing its lineage back through vocational and in-house training programs, distance education programs, and infotainment, media and communications corporations. The Virtual University unites the education sector and the information and communication services sector. Traditional university iconography is retained however, and many universities have found that their crest and name are their new ontology. Some older and more prestigious universities that have global brand-name recognition continue to claim a piece of the action by making strategic alliances with the global training, communications and infotainment companies (Disney/Boeing/ViaCom/Sony/Britannica/Microsoft are oft-mentioned combinations).
Students begin studying at the Virtual University in their mid teens, and continue to take study-modules throughout life, on a just-in-time, as-needs basis. Degree-length courses do not exist as such, but students self-select from thousands of study modules, each of which might take anything from a couple of hours, to a couple of hundred hours to complete. Most learning modules are informed by cognitive-constructionist learning theory, with an emphasis on case-based, situated (but virtual) problem solving. Some simple training modules continue to be based on behaviourist learning theory though, with an emphasis on drill and practice. Study modules are each organised around well-bounded, well-defined content and skill domains, and in that sense are discrete, but they are also articulated to many other study modules, and various collections of articulated modules usually define accreditation and qualification. Most modules are designed by large employers, by peak-body employer groups, and by special purpose education media companies, all of whom employ content experts, learning theorists, knowledge engineers, system designers and media directors for the purpose. Academics as such do not exist in the Virtual University.
Most assessment is automated, and routine communication is handled by mail-demons and intelligent software agents. Any correspondence or assessment requiring human intervention is fielded by graduates employed on a piece-work basis from globally co-ordinated answering services. Assessment and accreditation is recognised globally because performance is standardised globally, and each module's assessment sub-routines are able to measure student performance in criterion-referenced terms, and in relative-rank terms, on a global basis if required. Governments have withdrawn progressively from financial participation in tertiary education, then from regulatory participation, and the Virtual University is financed by pay-on-result student fees, private sector sponsorship, and advertising.
The Virtual University is far, far cheaper for students than campus-based education by 20 per cent to 60 per cent at the moment, and in the case of the projected 'mega-virtual-university', by a factor estimated at 36-1 7 yet in a market where hundreds of thousands of students will enrol in popular study modules at any one time, the same economies of scale which enable people to buy $200 million worth of movie for $7, enables an entrepreneur to spend a billion dollars developing a degree in a box, and still turn a profit. This also makes the Virtual University very attractive to investment capital. Recognition and accreditation of qualification is assured on a day-to-day basis by industry self-regulation, and ultimately by the market that consumes the graduates.
This of course is just one possible configuration for an unstable phenomena which is still emerging, and a way of participating in the emergence is to name, affirm and contest the various constructions of social and personal virtue which become embodied in its being. What social virtues then, are embedded and asserted by the Virtual University?
Change
The Virtual University represents a radical change in educational arrangements, and part of its appeal is the appeal that change per se has, at least within the current management paradigm.8 This paradigm insists that change is both desirable and inevitable, and that it is not sufficient for managers to manage, bureaucrats to direct, and administrators to administer. In this world managers, bureaucrats and administrators rule, and their function is not simply to ensure the smooth operation of work relations and work output within largely stable structures. Instead, the current-era manager-bureaucrat-administrator is a 'change agent' employed to 'reform' institutional structures, restructure work patterns and work relations, and do whatever possible to 'make a difference'. This valorisation of change is expressed as 'leadership'.
In this context few things are more attractive to the leader than the computer. The computer provides a powerful sign which invokes visions of masculine transcendentalism the leader striding decisively into tomorrow and the next millennium, grasping opportunities for increased efficiency and effectiveness, asserting rationality, dynamism, intelligence, sophistication, chic, speed, and all manner of manly tropes with which leaders wish to be associated.
But in addition to this iconical presence, the computer also has a functional presence in offices, bedrooms, classrooms, budgets and balance sheets, which operationalises the paradigm's valorisation of change. To adopt and use high technology is to problematise existing practices and relations. For high technology does not enable one to do the same thing one has always done more quickly, easily or effectively; rather it changes what we do. Work patterns change, work relations change, work flow and work output changes. Fundamentals, such as binary constructions of place and time work/play, home/office, bedroom/study become problematic. High technology has its imperatives and its preferences. It makes its demands. To introduce the computer into a social environment does not result in the same environment plus computers, just as the introduction of an exotic animal into a natural environment does not result in the same environment plus the animal. All things change to accommodate the exotic.
In the case of educational work practices the role of communications and information technologies as change agents could not be clearer. Indeed, one of the noticeable effects of introducing technology to existing educational processes is not the manner in which the technologies facilitate teaching and learning, but the manner in which they problematise all aspects of the how-and-why of teaching and learning. (What are 'mathematical skills' in a time of calculators and spreadsheets? What is 'writing' in a time of word processing, email, hypertext and multimedia?)
The Virtual University is a powerful change-agent which problematises all other universities and all university activities. The Virtual University is a radical manifestation of the lecture as a problem, the text-book as a problem, the three-year degree as a problem, the costs of education as a problem, scheduling and timetabling as a problem, and of course all of these problematised practice arrangements are displaced and radically changed by the Virtual University. Where change is read as good, the Virtual University is read as terrific.
Pedagogy
An often noted and often contested rhetorical device constructs change, reform and improvement as synonyms. If one accepts for a moment that the 'core business' of a university is pedagogical (difficult to do perhaps), then one might expect that the radical change manifest in the Virtual University would be re-presented as pedagogical 'improvement' or 'reform'. Thus far, however, experience with digital education is at best mixed. The most positive examples are case-studies which make generally modest and unverifiable claims drawn in relation to particular circumstances.9 Other stories suggest that digital technologies do not of themselves make a critical difference in enhancing the teaching and learning process.10 It is therefore to be expected that whilst distance education suits many students, and whilst many academics are pleased to make certain course materials available on the web, to communicate with students via email, and to employ multimedia products in the place of certain 'live' activities, these innovations are modest rather than dramatic, are heavily qualified, and are often undertaken in support of traditional methods rather than in the place of traditional methods.11 It may be that learning is better at the Virtual University12 (whatever that means), but a convincing case in support of the root and branch digital revolution simply has not been made in terms which have currency in the current pedagogical discourse. (Of course, that discourse is not a neutral judge, it is also a player in the game, and will change its parameters as it responds to the Virtual University with varying measures of accommodation and resistance.)
The absence of pedagogical legitimation might at first seem fatal to the credibility of the Virtual University, if one regards pedagogy as central to the enterprise. But universities are not alone in making enthusiastic investments in high technology, despite, not because of, the rationality of prevailing measures of core-business and self-interest. For example, throughout the 1970s tertiary or service industries invested billions of dollars in information technologies to transform white-collar work practices, and followed this up in the 1980s with billions of dollars more, despite a total absence of visible return in terms of fundamental indicators such as productivity, efficiency, dollar return on investment, or increased NDP.13 There was no clear profit pay-off for the companies that made the investment, yet massive IT investment occurred and continued. In early 1999 we see a similar story with a surge in investments in Internet stocks on the US stock exchange. Internet companies such as Yahoo and Amazon, which have no assets to speak of, have never made a profit and have no clear business plan projecting a profit, are valued on the Exchange as being worth billions of dollars collectively. What is going on here?
High technology may not be attractive when framed by the normal rules of the game, whether it be teaching and learning, or profit making. The thing is, high technology plays by different rules, and thereby changes the rules of the game.
But even if there is a clear and convincing case demonstrating the superiority of digital pedagogy, can this in itself account for the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars14 on educational technologies? Perhaps, but improved pedagogy in itself has not in the past provided sufficient motive for such massive expenditure. For example, the theoretical and empirical support for co-operative, situated and social-constructivist teaching and learning methods is as close as it gets to a closed case in education, and non-technological methods have long been available to implement these methods, without attracting anything like the enthusiastic support offered to digital methods. Even if one does not allow this case, imagine for the sake of argument the existence of a clear and convincing body of evidence suggesting that teaching and learning is improved by reforms such as resourcing more student places, enabling smaller tutorial groups, improving access to library resources, encouraging experienced academics to do more teaching, and so on. Can one imagine the same financial, human and bureaucratic concentration of effort being brought to bear to resource these changes as is being brought to bear to implement digital technologies?
Quite clearly the Virtual University has an appeal which does rely on pedagogical discourses, just as IT investments have had an appeal for business independent of asset/profit ratios. Arguments constrained by the concerns of pedagogy, teaching and learning per se, just do not cut it.
Commodification
Of course, a problem in spending billions of dollars more on traditional education is that one is funding inputs to an uncertain process, without any real prospect of controlling outputs. At the core of traditional face-to-face methods of education is an uncertain process. Learning is characterised as a process. Teaching and learning is something that one does. As a romanticised ideal, traditional institutionalised education brings together those who want to learn, those who want to teach, texts and other representations of knowledge, and over time, through co-participation and interaction in a more or less co-ordinated set of activities, teaching and learning is said to occur. Outcomes are inherently uncertain, and quality assurance is only provided by controlling teacher qualifications, syllabi, and other inputs.
Commodification is realised by the Virtual University when co-operative intellectual activity, communication and social relations in the lecture theatre, seminar room or the laboratory become intellectual capital on the web-site. Knowledge of techniques, methods and discourses ceases to be manifest in live human action and human relations when displaced and re-presented digitally. What was embodied in an unfolding social and intellectual relationship becomes a commercially transacted proprietary product that is sold, leased or franchised to unseen consumers. An ongoing induction in the discourses of a discipline, entered into jointly and negotiated over an extended period becomes a modularised courseware product to be privately consumed rather than collectively experienced.
Traditional education can be described in similarly bleak terms. The social relations that emerge in a face-to-face context are constituted in claims to knowledge, power, authority, status, in hierarchical and patriarchal structures, in cloistered juvenility, in privilege, power and resource differentials, and in monologues and other oppressions. But the very uncertainty of a relatively undisciplined and unruly process leaves space for contestation, inspiration, revelation, co-operation, dialogue and other liberations. The commercial relations that emerge in the context of the Virtual University have also been described as a mix of virtues and horrors, but the mix is more consistent and controlled. Traditional process-based educational methods are impossible to centralise, difficult to standardise, and difficult to manage and measure, dependent as they are upon highly variable human interactions and relationships. Commodification through digitisation enables centralisation, standardisation, management and measurement to occur. Through careful attention to systems analysis and design, commercial relations may be controlled all the way down to the level of individual systemclient interactions. The Virtual University thereby takes up and amplifies these notions of instrumentalism and efficiency as applied to learning and its outcome certified knowledge.
Consistent quality assurance, implicit in C3I systems-development life cycles,15 is implemented by the extensive and sophisticated batteries of methods that control the engagement, assessment and management of students. But it is not just the students who are subject to cybernetic regimes of surveillance and feedback. Student engagement with and responses to the educational products may be closely defined, measured and compared, which enables the instrumental efficiency of the product to be measured at the same time as student performance is measured. Total Quality Management implemented in this form makes the transfer and vocational marketability of the certified knowledge of students much more straightforward, and at the same time makes the global marketability of the branded educational product more straightforward. The teaching and learning commodity therefore has a known dollar value redeemable by the Virtual University's investors, sub-contractors and franchisees, and a known tradeable value redeemable by students on the employment market, and a known instrumental value redeemable by the consumers of students as employees. This sort of standardisation of inputs, processes and outputs based around bench-marked 'world's best practice', is assured as an integral feature of the product. It is indicative of a narrowing 'human capital', 'competency based', 'outcomes focussed' approach to education and training which is quite evident in traditional education, but is taken to new heights by the Virtual University.
Markets
Of course, to manufacture and sell an educational commodity presupposes the existence of a market for that commodity, and places the operation of the market in a crucial role in respect to the provision and conduct of education.
In a sense education has always been framed by a market, insofar as competition (for students, for funding, for ontological and epistemological influence) has always occurred (between individual academics, academic gangs, education sectors, secular and church systems, colleges, universities and schools), and insofar as this competition can be said to constitute a market. However, the market configured around digital educational commodities, rather than face-to-face services, is qualitatively different to the operation of traditional educational markets in at least a couple of respects.
The most obvious difference is that the digital education market is insensitive to space and time. Computers can run day and night and bits can travel very quickly. The Virtual University, housed on computers and composed of bits, is everywhere (and is nowhere) and is always available to all students. It makes little difference to the Virtual University whether a student is in Los Angeles, Kalgoorlie or Bangalore, whether he or she wants to study one day a week or seven, at night or during the day, one subject or lots of subjects, starting in May or starting in September, along with thirty other students or 30,000. All people in the world who have access to the Internet constitute a single global market for education, and all digital education providers compete in that same market.
The Virtual University offers a tertiary education which is very cheaply accessed, which makes its services available at any time and any place convenient to the student, and which encourages enrolments rather than setting up entry barriers. This is described as 'flexible learning' or 'open learning" to construct a binary opposition to traditional (closed, inflexible) face-to-face practices. The Virtual University is thus moving tertiary education from the economies of local, expensive, labour-intensive, hand-craft production as public service, to the economies of mass production and distribution, with all the expansion of market that this move implies. An educational Henry Ford has not emerged yet, but it cannot be long before s/he does.
As publicly funded institutions, traditional universities and schools sought legitimation in a grand discourse which centred on the modernist virtues of meritocracy, intellectual rigour, social service, service to the nation, public good, the enrichment of youth and the advancement of knowledge, and whilst these grandiose modernist icons now look rather grotesque, grand narratives and utopian quests formed a sometimes useful context for educational polemics and political action. In contrast, the Virtual University seeks legitimacy only in the marketplace, through a discourse which valorises efficiency, market reach, cost effectiveness, private consumption, private benefit, individual responsibility and consumer sovereignty. The legitimacy of certified knowledge, and therefore of the educational product that constructed that knowledge will be a matter for the market to determine. The only questions to be answered are 'will it attract students?' and 'will the students be attractive?'.
Silence
In this new educational market students will be empowered to pick and choose digital study products and will have the power that all consumers in the over-developed world have, that is, the power to take 'the best' and leave the rest on the shelf.
This exercise of power through consumption, coupled with high levels of individuation and dispersed delivery systems, reduces the Virtual University's student 'masses' to atomised social agents. Certainly, the Virtual University provides many opportunities for students to chat and to socialise, or to discuss aspects of their work. Virtual cafes, bars, lounges, seminars and study groups abound, and the Virtual University may well enable or even encourage a cacophony of voices to accumulate at a single site. These, however, are places owned by the Virtual University and ultimately controlled by the Virtual University, and made available to customers as an act of largesse. They are not the street, an agora, city square, or the commons, and they are not controlled by the masses. In disembodying the learner and providing only for these congregations in cyberspace (if at all), the Virtual University provides for new regimes of discipline. No landlords and no police in the street have the power that the systems administrator/operator has in his or her domain. As the owner of this private property, the Virtual University's panopticon SysOps are in a position to hear and see all that transpires, whether that position is exercised or not, and may silence or punish one or all at a key-stroke. Through the systemic discipline exercised by either direct moderation of communication, or by the nascent presence of ubiquitous surveillance and kill-file options, the Virtual University's private cyberspace allows for far more controlled, rule-bound and oppressive spaces, in which coherence to the instrumental purposes and wider interests of the enterprise may be rigidly enforced. It thereby reduces the capacity for communication among those who share the same material conditions or subjectivities, and reduces the capacity of the masses for organisation and the joint exercise of power. As Aristotle argued,16 the masses are without wealth and are without heredity and tradition, and they draw significantly upon their sheer number in the exercise of power. As all teachers know, sometimes to their regret, masses of students congregated in one place have a power not possessed by the sum of their fragmented and dispersed parts.
Not only are the dispersed and watched masses thus disempowered, market-based choice making also denies individual students a voice in their education. A market structure is configured around choice, and influence over products and services (such as it exists) is exercised in the main through choice, not through dialogue. Consumers are required to sample a product or service, and are invited to approve, or to buy elsewhere next time. The Virtual University empowers students to choose. It thereby mediates in favour of silence, privileges consumption as a catalyst for change, privileges binaries (like it or lump it, buy it or not), and annihilates argument, negotiation, contestation, compromise and communication, all of which are important in the conduct of face-to-face education. (Indeed, some might say that argument, negotiation, contestation and so on constitute the discourses which are at the heart of face-to-face education.)
Further to this, when teaching is mediated entirely through high technology, 'the student' exists only in the bit-world. She ceases to be a human being with whom the teacher engages, and rather, becomes an abstraction constituted in data files, digital responses and statistical comparisons, log-on times, test scores and other salient outputs of the system's student management and assessment sub-routines. Computers are ontological disciplinarians. Data entities, data types, data forms, data-processing outcomes, input and outputs are all rigidly specified. The student is specified by the system. The student is no less and no more than the system allows, and can do no less and no more than the system allows.
Student agency is further weakened in so much as opportunities for dialogue and communal activity are undermined by the fracturing of commonly held understandings of the world. The Virtual University 'narrow casts' finely grained knowledge products for individual selection and consumption, thus radically accelerating the already rapid trend toward educational specialisation and customisation. Individuals may pick and choose highly specific, modularised and flexible knowledge products on a just-in-time basis, from a hundred (or a hundred thousand) competing packages. Because there are a million stories in this digital education marketplace, some perhaps with a niche market of one, there is any story, and hence there is no story shared by the educated. Rather than an exposure to a coherent body of knowledge and associated skills, one is exposed to 'information singularities'.17 To the extent that a wide range of educational products are available for selection, and to the extent that they are self-contained and loosely coupled, power shifts from the supply side where coherent courses and programs of study are determined by educational providers, to the demand side where the consumer exercises sovereignty. A shift from supply-side command orchestration to demand-side free selection reduces opportunities to construct the coherent shared narratives and grand discourses which frame our own experiences and subjectivities.
Pursuing a similar theme, Anthony Giddens distinguished between 'emancipatory politics', involving a concern with the condition of the world, and 'life politics', focussing on one's personal condition and the conduct of one's life in the world.18 As the modernist curriculum is displaced by self-managed and self-selected journeys through fractured, heterogeneous mosaics of multi-media and multi-modal knowledge packages, so the world-defining narratives and meta-narratives put in place by coercive educational discourses are weakened. Emancipatory politics ceases to be shaped by these weakened modernist meta-narratives and is increasingly shaped by the tropes of the mass media and by the subtext provided by global educational providers, whilst life politics ceases to be contextualised and oriented by these narratives and becomes more individuated and solipsistic. Silence is again favoured, as the knowledge we are conscious of is not shared by others, and the understandings that are shared are not consciously held.
At another level though, overarching this highly individuated consumption, is the homogenising force one might infer from the Virtual University's control of information production. To the extent that educational products are highly focussed and individuated, the educated may hold very little knowledge in common, but as consumers of commonly sourced educational products, the educated are covertly exposed to a common weltanschauung and a common ethos. Our overt, formal educational curriculum therefore produces specialisation, fragmentation and divergence, whilst the subtext produces convergence and homogeneity.
All educationalists are aware of the significance of the pervasive subtext which implicitly teaches the truths held by the tribe. The Virtual University manifests and reproduces a subtext that adores the technological in the social, and marginalises the social in the technical. The Virtual University does this clearly and powerfully through placing technology at the centre of teaching and learning, and thus at the centre of the student's educational universe. At the virtual university all learning, knowledge, skills, concepts and understandings are mediated through and with digital technology. The student manipulates the technology, learns from the technology, communicates with the technology, is assessed by the technology, relates to the technology. Yet another domain of human activity, and realm of desire, is not just technically mediated, but technically saturated. When at the centre of the experiential life world, the technological subtext suggests that bits and atoms are isomorphic and that modelling something is doing something, that reality is a watered down hyper-reality, that virtual experience is not vicarious, that rationality is privileged over being, that convenience is an important concern and efficiency is an overriding concern, that an exchange of messages is conversation, that a community can be constituted in text, that information can be processed, that a simulation is not a simulacra, that learning is a matter of individual cognition and that education is an individual activity. The very centrality of the technology and its bit-world shouts the virtue of technological mediation and the bit-world, and asserts that the human condition is advanced through the application of more and better technology.
The Subject
The constitution and status of the subject within and by a culture has always been a powerful indicator and manifestation of personal and public values. A system of values implicit in the Virtual University's marriage of digital commodities, markets, and education, valorises, facilitates and requires a particular construction of individualism. This construction is founded on autonomy, self-direction, self-improvement, independence, abstraction, personal empowerment and self-sufficiency. This cultural formation of a sense of self and an orientation to the world premised on the individual is foundational in the ethos of markets. It is legitimised in the definition and articulation of human desires and ambitions as personal desires and ambitions, in the definition of needs as individual needs, in the extension of private enterprise and the retreat of public service, in the marginalising of commonality, negotiation and egalitarianism in the name of choice, diversity, and in the exaltation of freedom-of-the-individual and individual identity.
The solipsistic individual, motivated by personal fulfilment, personal ambition, personal satisfaction, individual rights, individual needs and individual expression, is the Virtual University's cybernetic construction, and its preoccupations stand in stark contrast to the now irrelevant and laughably outmoded notions of national interest, class interests, the common good, shared ideals, community, unionism or public service. The very notion of a personal computer, jacked into a 'frictionless' global market, providing highly differentiated, high-discretion, self-directed activities, supporting the construction of one's own knowledge, at one's own pace and in one's own time, in pursuit of one's own interests and ambitions, can be seen to indicate the presence of a new and stark form of individualism. Rather than creating and appealing to the now exhausted modernist ethos which created the idealised, broadly educated, intellectually curious, socially engaged 'renaissance man', such an education system creates and appeals to the cybernetic hyper-individual, a silent, abstracted, fragmented, alienated, pragmatic consumer.
Conclusion
The Virtual University's project is not to improve teaching and learning, at least, not as it is constituted in traditional pedagogical discourses. Rather, it creates a new pedagogy and a new education system which resonates harmoniously with central characteristics of our condition change, commodification, the centrality of markets, fragmentation, customisation, instrumentalism, hyper-individualism. Face-to-face teaching does not, and is archaic. The appeal of the Virtual University is to be found in this correspondence.
But in telling this story we have quite lost sight of the contingency of the technologies, students and education systems. High technology is quite capable of joining other discourses of practice, and in so doing, perhaps, ensuring that the Virtual University's representations and constructions of social virtue do not establish the paradigm for educational arrangements.
For example, high technology in the form of web-based discussion groups, list-servers, MUD and MOO chat-rooms and the like, are capable of forming an alliance with different pedagogies and methods, reinforcing dialogical education by providing another site for, and mode of, conversation, debate, shared positions and shared differences. This constructs and represents another layer of communalism, adding to its depth and facilitating co-operative and collaborative approaches to the intellectual and social work of students and teachers.
Also, simulated 'virtual environments' and new communications technologies may be enrolled to create new sites for the social construction of knowledge and skills through the resurrection of apprenticeship and mentorship, now almost archaic modes of learning based on guided action in highly situated contexts, in which learning is demonstrated and passed on through shared practice.
Other adventures are also possible, but they are different stories for another day.
Footnotes
1. A. Gilbert, 'The Virtual University?' in G. Hart and J. Mason (eds), The Virtual University?: Symposium Proceedings and Case-studies, The University of Melbourne, 1996.
2. The Western Governors University may be visited at http://www.wgu.edu/wgu/index.html
3. The Open University may be visited at http://www.open.ac.uk/
4. The Canadian 'Virtual U' is not so much a university as a software kit used to construct a university. It takes the form of a custom-designed software platform through which research, courseware and other learning commodities and intellectual property may be marketed to the world. The software may be examined at http://virtual-u.cs.sfu.ca/vuweb/. The software development and marketing is financed by a consortium whichincludes Kodak, IBM, Microsoft, McGraw-Hill, Prentice-Hall, Rogers Cablesystems, Unitel, Novasys, Nortel, Bell Canada, and MPR Teltech, and the project proposal predicts a Canadian market of 50 billion dollars. See D. F. Noble, 'Digital Diploma Mills The Automation of Higher Education', Monthly Review, vol. 49, no. 9, Feb. 1998, pp. 38-52.
5. The California Virtual University may be visited at http://www.california.edu/
6. The Price-Waterhouse-Coopers Virtual University may be visited at http://www.vu.pw.com/
7. J. Daniel, Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, London, Kogan Page, 1996.
8. See for example P. F. Drucker, The Executive in Action, New York, HarperBusiness, 1996, or T. J. Peters, Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution, London, Macmillan, 1988.
9. For examples see R. Kevill, R. Oliver and R. Phillips, 'What Works and Why?', Conference Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Computers in Tertiary Education, Curtin University of Technology, 1997.
10. See for example P. A. McClure, 'Technology plans and measurable outcomes', Educom Review, vol. 31, no. 3, 1996, pp. 29-30; M. Moore and G. Kearsley, Distance Education: A Systems View, Belmont, Wadsworth Publishing, 1996; D. L. Wilson, 'Self Paced Studies', Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. XLII, no. 21, 1996.
11. M. Arnold, 'Using the Web to Augment Teaching and Learning' in R. Kevill, R. Oliver and R. Phillips, ASCILITE97: Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Computers in Tertiary Education, Curtin University, 1997, pp. 37-41.
12. A claim made from time to time. See for example J. Daniel, 'Distance Learning: the Vision and Distance Learning: the Reality. What Works, What Travels?', electronic publication, available at http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/kpmgfla.htm, Feb. 1999.
13. T. K. Landauer, The Trouble with Computers; Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity, Cambridge, MA, A Bradford Book, MIT Press, 1997.
14. D. F. Noble, 'Digital Diploma Mills The Automation of Higher Education', Monthly Review, vol. 49, no. 9, Feb. 1998, pp. 38-52.
15. C3I stands for Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence a signature theme adopted by the US military in the development of weapons systems, and applied in 'top-down, structured' systems analysis and design discourses.
16. R. Shields, Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, London, Sage, 1996, p.154.
17. 'Topothesia, "An Information Singularity" ', an electronic publication, available at http://www.clas.ufl.edu/anthro/Tpethesia.html (1995).
18. A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991.
