Theory and Practice of the Virtual University?
James Cornford and Neil Pollock (University of Newcastle)

In recent years there has been a phenomenal interest in the growth of what some are calling 'digital', 'online', or 'Virtual' universities. Indeed, today, it is commonplace to read that information and communication technologies are radically reconfiguring the landscape of higher education, changing the very 'nature' of the university. You will already know the vision: a decrease in importance of the campus, as students 'login' from a distance to access 'courseware', new media technologies (like video-conferencing) replacing traditional lectures, courses being delivered and assessed over the Internet, promising to make higher education available anywhere and at anytime.

Depicted as a solution to the increasingly demanding problems of higher education, all of this has fired the imagination of academics, policy makers, university managers, and educational specialists alike, the assumption often appears to be that institutions can move straightforwardly toward this vision. Yet, our recent research - conducted under the ESRC's Virtual Society? Programme - suggests that the universities which we have studied have found the introduction of new technologies, alongside their more traditional methods of providing teaching and learning, extremely difficult and that the actual model of Virtual University which we have seen emerging bears little relationship to the vision. What we have found, in short, is that the Virtual University works in theory but not in practice.

Virtual practices and campus culture
Charles Crook, David Barrowcliff (Bournemouth University), Paul Light, Emma Nesbit (Loughborough University), Viv Light and Su White (University of Southampton)

The potential of more virtual practices within universities is often judged in relation to the successes (and shortfalls) of IT supported distance education. Yet for some purposes distance education provides an inappropriate point of comparison. The constituency of learners is typically very different in terms of age profile, commitments, experiences, expectations, ambitions and motivations. Virtual practices in distance education involve mobilising technology to create, from scratch, a rather different site for learning.- a distributed site. By contrast, virtual practices in traditional higher education involve re-configuring a familiar site to create something more "flexible", more "open"; something entailing activities less anchored to particulars of time and space.

We discuss empirical findings from a project that scrutinises the "virtualisation" process as it is visible in three traditional university campuses. We believe that virtual practices act at various levels within the system of teaching and learning that has evolved in typical university settings. At some levels, we find resilience and resistance to re-mediations. At other levels we find more plasticity.

To illustrate this we shall discuss observations of how enhanced IT resourcing affects the distribution of study activity across a traditional campus infrastructure. We shall discuss electronic conferencing systems as alternatives to traditional seminars. We shall discuss electronic communications as a species of tutorial contact. And we shall discuss the impact of networked computing on private study as a form of "desktop" activity distributed in time and across local resources.

Our conclusion will be that, in respect of social and cultural systems, expectations and practices associated with higher education are well entrenched and not easily changed by new technology. On the other hand, new technology may provoke quite striking shifts in the patterning of more private study practices.

Scholarly communication and "technology"
Neil Jacobs, Department of Information Science, Loughborough University, N.A.Jacobs@lboro.ac.uk

The paper reports on empirical research being conducted into academic researchers, scholarly communication and ICTs. Although the research clearly touches on issues of reflexivity, the main focus of this paper is on methodological and substantive matters (while acknowledging the unsustainability of such a divide).

A two-part project is underway that seeks to investigate any link between citation measures as examples of scholarly communication and representations of the discourse of academic researchers focusing on the place of ‘technology’ in their work. The project is cast in semiotic terms, and draws on some aspects of the actor-network. In this sense, the stance of the project might offer a creative tension with some aspects of the conference agenda, being more ‘Virtual Society! Get Real?’ than vice versa.

The first part of the project focuses on citations as examples (rather than as indicators) of scholarly communication practices, and seeks to investigate any systematic variance in citation practice between a number of academic departments. Citations have exercised a variety of theorists, including Woolgar [1991] and Latour [1987]. They can be understood in a number of ways, including as persuasive traces of an actor-network, as the writerly performance of scholarly activity, or as a social institution of academic life. The fact that this project treats citations as a semiotic system does not preclude other interpretations / constructions. However, semiotics is not necessarily qualitative. The commonly recognised Bradford distribution [Brookes 1969] is used in this project as a means of characterising citation data from 11 academic departments from universities in the UK midlands.

The second part of the project has even stronger links with Latour’s work, being in part an operationalisation of the ‘hume-condillac’ induction machine put forward in [Teil and Latour 1995]. This posits the idea that meaningful patterns can be identified within textual data merely by counting the associations between words. Co-word analysis has long been used as an alternative to co-citation methods in mapping scientific literature [Callon, Law and Rip 1986]. Its use with interview data is less common, though not entirely novel [Monarch and Gluch 1995]. In this part of the project, co-word analysis is being used to develop representations of interview data from the 11 academic departments used in the first part. These representations are understood as offering an experimental field, into which test signals may be introduced and their effects monitored. In this case, the test signal is a common-sense (ICT-oriented) definition of ‘technology’.

The two parts of the project are linked by simple comparison. The citation measures, as examples of scholarly communication, are compared with the effects of introducing the test signal ‘technology’ into the co-word network representations of the interview data. Preliminary results indicate that a small correlation is apparent between these two independent measures. Assuming this to be confirmed, its significance is then discussed.

References

• Brookes, B.C. (1969) Bradford’s Law and the bibliography of science. Nature,
• 224, 953-956.
• Callon, M., Law, J. and Rip, A. eds (1986) Mapping the dynamics of science and technology. Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan.
• Latour, B. (1987) Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
• Monarch, I. and Gluch, D.P. (1995) An experiment in software development risk information. Technical Report CMU/SEI-95-TR-14. Pittsburgh: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.
• Teil, G. and Latour, B. (1995) The Hume machine: can association networks do more than formal rules? SEHR, 4 (2), Constructions of the Mind. Available at: http://shr.stanford.edu/shreview/4-2/text/teil-latour.html
• Woolgar (1991) Beyond the citation debate: towards a sociology of measurement technologies and their use in science policy. Science and Public Policy, 18, 319-326.