Jen Ross and I have a chapter out in the new book edited by Robin Goodfellow and Mary Lea. Literacy in the Digital University comes out of the excellent ESRC seminar series of the same name, which Robin led and blogged here. Our chapter considers the pedagogy of the ‘E-learning and digital cultures’ MSc course taught by Jen and I, and delivered on the open web (not to be confused with the MOOC of the same name!). It uses Foucault’s notion of heterotopia to consider how we might conceptualize this kind of usage of web ‘space’ within education, and draws on theories of critical posthumanism to explore what happens to our notion of the learning ‘subject’ when we work within such a heterotopic space. Finally, having troubled the notions both of ‘subject’ and ‘space’, we extend the discussion into the kinds of literacies which emerge within such a territory.
