Have we absented ourselves from participation in change?

What role does the idea of innovation play in the work published in E-Learning and Digital Media? It might be argued that it is not necessary to talk about innovation because the evolution of the digital aspect of learning and the continued digitalization of media are already doing the work of innovation – meaning to speak about it doesn’t add anything new or useful to our understanding. Well, this is debateable. The danger is that if the production of innovation is not subjectively engaged in a critically self-conscious way, then the political subjectivity of the individual is surrendered. In other words, technological work in education becomes a series of already produced positions, ideas, slogans and rhetoric. After this point, it becomes difficult to say that we are still participating in a process of change without also saying that we have absenced our capacity to transform this process as individuals. As such, learning, study, research and even education are merely jobs in the forms of work – an action where the end is already known (see Arendt, 1998). The ironic challenge for much of the research published in the field of educational technology, E-Learning specifically, is to move beyond the allure of empirical evidence of the already believed, in order to ask something altogether new. Isn’t this a problem for the usefulness of research and research reporting, unless the idea is merely to replicate what has already been replicated?

As such, there is no need to talk about innovation, to reflect upon its underpinning intentions, because the evolution of the electronic and the digital, as affirmations of our ever-improving technological capacity, do the talking for us. This absencing of the thought of innovation can be taken even further in that the appearance of these developments, in the form of new technologies and hence new ways of doing things, appears to signal that change, and novelty that we associate with innovation, has already transpired, expired. What we are describing here is the logic of political economy in that the action that produces the new does not survive once the artefact of the new appears. In other words, the rich layers of questioning and thinking that are responsible for a so-called technological innovation in education, are seen as by-products, rather than as having essential technological value. The illusion is that it doesn’t matter how we get there, what matters is that we get there! One might argue that if this were so then technologists would not be able to reproduce the same or like results. This is true, but in this case, there is no longer innovation because replication of what has already been realized cannot be an affirmation of change and novelty; innovation only returns if this capacity to replicate is disrupted through being found wanting through new actions that address the problem that the original innovation now fails to address.

What is the effect of this form of action, this way of behaving such that we must constantly perform to produce new ends? Does the production of new educational goods, new electronic services and new digital media markets, as are said to be the outcomes of the innovation that drive economic development address the problems we consider to be of major significance (poverty, disease, political conflict, pollution, global warming, among others)? If not, in what way does this behaviour of addressing the significance of innovation as merely an end in itself condition the way in which we fail to analyse the nature of such problems and, as such, fail to address them more effectively? It seems that in this day and age, we can only address the significance of such questions by observing with greater interest our implication in the actions that produce change and novelty – because today it is change and novelty (innovation) that characterize our problem with initiating and executing actions. Of course, to show greater interest in our implication in the process of innovation supposes that we would need to be able to draw the relationship between how we understand our implication in the process of innovation and our work in education. To this effect, we are asking: does the writing of a research article comprise more than an act of work – does it lead to new beginnings?

The process of innovation cannot simply be understood as a process in which a necessary number of subjects must populate the production function of an institution for the purpose of making its service profitable. Furthermore, the right to be innovative cannot be restricted, as Sennett (2006) argues, to the privileged few who are granted permission to initiate change and novelty. We are all significant parties in the process of innovation, irrespective of the fact that we would find it difficult to tie our authorship to the innovative activity that is occurring within the spectrum of our activities. Being party to the process of innovation and therefore being a contributor to what makes innovation possible needs to be seen in terms of the overall orientation of its purpose. In Drucker’s (1959) words, the purpose of innovation is to bed society into a new vision. Critically, this should lead us to conclude that innovation needs to be thought of not only as that which makes this orientation possible in terms of new developments that captivate the attention of society but also and more importantly in terms of something that is being done to us.

There are various ways in which we might speak about the paradox that results from this vision of innovation being applied to education. One can be the most politically passive academic, meeting minimum requirements of teaching and research, and yet one is still populating the institution's production function. One may differentiate oneself from the actions of commercial management's critical initiatives in order to implement changes that will improve the institution’s status in the sector and in the market place. However, without the student numbers and an adequate roster of staff, there is no a priori rationale for taking initiatives that improve the institution’s ranking, improve the enrolment numbers of foreign students and improve the success rate in securing external funding. In this way, students and staff provide an indispensable precondition to being innovative in the tertiary sector and in education in general and in so doing they become actors who populate the innovation process, and yet it is not clear whether we can call students and staff innovative merely on account of their participation in the institution's production function.

Specifically how does populating the production function of an institution represent participation in the institution’s process of innovation, when we ourselves would not consider our actions to involve what we would consider to be an innovative activity? Addressing this question has to do with how we draw a relationship between our actions in our work and the mechanism that orients the production function – how this function classifies and measures the significance of the actions of its subjects. Our position on the continuum is relative! We may do the minimum of what is asked of us while perhaps holding contrary, radical and even covert beliefs, and yet we make up the numbers that enable the institution to perform. At a more explicit level, course reviews, teacher reviews, the assumption of administrative tasks, publishing in journals with a higher impact factor, contributing to research funding audits etc., all contribute to the institution’s capacity to be more ambitious. In obligating you in your role to be more performative the institution is able to imbue the habitus of the academy with an obligation to be more participative in the competitive spirit that drives the institution’s production function. As such, we can say that populating the institution’s production function becomes tantamount to participation in the institution’s innovation processes, through individuals becoming embedded in the performative orientation towards realizing the vision that performative actions are individually beneficial – something that is sometimes rewarded with improved conditions or remuneration and sometimes not.

The scholarship of educational media, as evident in E-Learning and Digital Media provides both evidence of these performances and a space to critically engage with their nature. The study of media in educational institutions is an opportunity to question rather than reinforce or embed the conceptual devices that oblige academic research to perform in particular, largely instrumental, ways. This opportunity involves a shift from the worryingly uncritical and ubiquitous rhetoric of technological innovation (particularly regarding the very concept of ubiquity), towards innovations in thinking about E-Learning and Digital Media.