This article examines how two African American females composed counter-selves using a computer motherboard and a stand-alone microphone as critical identity texts. Situated within sociocultural and critical traditions in new literacy studies and black feminist thought, the authors extend conceptions of language, literacy and black femininity via…

This article offers an academic critique of new media culture, as viewed comparatively with George Orwell's "1984." The author makes the argument that a number of plot elements of "1984" are reflected within contemporary Western societies. The assertion is made that these parallels have developed as a consequence of new…

The dichotomous epistemology of explicit/implicit knowledge has led to two parallel lines of research; one putting the emphasis on explicit knowledge which has been the main road of e-learning, and the other taking implicit knowledge as the core of learning which has shaped a critical line to the current e-learning. It is argued in this article…

Neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology of our day. As with all ideologies, it influences without drawing attention to itself. Critical pedagogy, with its focus on the oppressed and marginalised, offers a perspective on the media and education that seeks to expose neoliberalism's hegemonic power. Traditional media has become complicit…

The opportunities social media provide for agential expressions of subjectivity and experiential learning, relative to social media's role in reproducing digital-era capitalism, are the subject of keen debate. There is now a burgeoning academic literature which suggests that social media users are, to a greater or lesser degree, alienated by…

Learning outcomes, as a conceptual base, are a recognised phenomenon in higher education. Advances in technology, such as web-based technologies in teaching, have facilitated learning efficiency, while such technologies relation to learning outcomes remains a popular topic of research. In this article, we have employed the feedback of 312 Finnish…

In the last decade, the concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) has gained an undeniable momentum. However, it is an easy trap to confuse download and registration rates with actual learning and interest in the adoption and reuse of OER. If we focus solely on access, we cannot differentiate between processes of mere information foraging and…

Inspired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's landmark decision to make its teaching and learning materials freely available to the public as OpenCourseWare (OCW), many other higher education institutions have followed suit sharing resources now more generally referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER). The University of Cape…

The seminal work of Prensky on "digital natives" and "digital wisdom" is used to launch a broader discussion on the relations between electronic communication, higher education, and popular and elite culture. Prensky's critics commonly contrast his polarisations and generational divisions with a more complex picture of types of engagement with…

The phenomenal growth and subsequent increasing use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) innovations has led to an increase in their use in higher education over the past decade. Past research has criticised e-learning (compared to traditional face-to-face lecturing) for its failure to engage students in their learning. However, King…

Personalisation has increasingly become a concern in policy making, public service, information technology (IT) provision and academic traditions. This article is concerned with how personalisation and personalised learning are suggested to reform Swedish higher education. The empirical material is official documents from the Swedish policy…

Schooled in an earlier time, educators are laboring to find meaningful purchase in new media environments, unable to match the fluency and sophistication of their "digital native" students. Yet is Marc Prensky's portrayal of teachers as "digital immigrants" really an accurate rendering of the today's situation? Drawing on phenomenological and…

The design of experiences and, in particular, educational experiences is a complex matter and involves not only using effective technologies and applying cognitive triggers, but there is a need to "think outside the box" in order to also design for the affective dimension of human experiences; the impressions, feelings and interactions that a…

The aim of this article is to present the findings from a small exploratory case study of an open course on cyberpunk literature conducted at the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), an online grass-roots organisation that runs non-accredited courses. Employing actor network theory to inform an ethnographic-inductive approach, the case study sought to…

In support of the conclusions and recommendations in the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), this article makes explicit the connections between the economic rationale used in the plan and the educational transformations it recommends. The article reviews macroeconomic research, microeconomic research, labor market and workforce studies,…