Assembling university learning technologies for an open world: connecting institutional and social networks

This paper considers the emergence of social media in university teaching and learning and the capacity or universities as complex organisations with disparate interacting parts to respond to the shift of pedagogies and practices to open networks. Institutional learning technology environments reflect a legacy of prescriptive, hierarchical arrangements associated with enterprise systems, and are a poor fit with the heterarchical and self-organised potential for learning associated with social media and open education practices. In this paper we focus on the tensions that arise from the juxtaposition of these two orientations to learning technologies, and focus on how an emerging online sociality can destabilise established boundaries of learning and connect to other domains of practice