Does digital difference exist?
What are the points of rift, and the points of continuity, between virtual learning spaces and their equivalents in the real?
Are digital learning environments now orthodox?
How have our digital imaginaries changed? Can we still talk in terms of a ‘cyberspace’? Is cyberspace – and the techno-utopianism and dystopianism it simultaneously represented – finished?
Is the spatial metaphor of cyberspace still helpful and sustainable for learners and teachers?
What qualities of difference concern us?
Do we still believe that pedagogy should drive technology, or has determinism lost its status as a taboo for teachers and learning technologists?
If so, how is virtuality now determining pedagogy? What forms might these pedagogies take? To what extent are they radically different?
Does the latest generation of so-called ‘Web 2.0’ technologies hold a new promise and a new arena of difference for pedagogical practice? Are these spaces and technological practices assimilable by conventional teaching and assessment orthodoxies? Should they be?
What is the relation between orality, literacy and technoliteracy in contemporary modes of teaching and learning?
Do the visual logics of the screen ask us to re-craft our approach to knowledge and pedagogy?
Are digital texts ‘monsters’, indefinable by existing classificatory categories? How authoritative can scholarly digital texts and discourses be? Does the online ‘crisis in authorship’ fundamentally problematise individuation and related assessment practices?
Does the digital re-position difference?
Do we need to re-think earlier conceptions of how gender, disability, race, class and age are rearticulated for online students?
How do we now see power as operating in online classes? Do we still see it as operating differently from that in face to face spaces?
Are universities now dealing with ‘generations of difference’? Does the ‘digital native’ really exist? Do we now have to think in terms of a ‘Generation C’ – a generation of content producers? What teaching environments, what pedagogical practices, might work for these learners?
How is difference positioned by the University?
Do university practices and orthodoxies place a limit on real digital difference? Are the implications of the digital really too transgressive for the university to accommodate? Are the bureaucratic needs of QAA preventing flexibility in approaches to elearning?
Have managerialism and instrumentalism appropriated online learning? Is a radical online pedagogy still even possible or has ‘e-learning’ become just managerialist spin on cost-cutting and resource re-distribution?
How do the new business practices emerging through the digital affect higher education organisations?
Given the concerns evident in the questions above is 'open source education' possible and/or desirable? Develop this question