Adam Matthews

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Research Fellow at University of Birmingham

This collective article presents a theoretical kaleidoscope, the multiple lenses of which are used to examine and critique citizen science and humanities in postdigital contexts and from postdigital perspectives. It brings together 19 short theoretical and experiential contributions, organised into six loose groups which explore areas and perspecti...

Universities have grown to be complex institutions, networked both inwardly and outwardly within society. This has produced a complex network of humans, technologies, discourses, policy, and diverse and contested path dependent ideas on what a university is and does. Digital technologies have changed many social practices but promises of innovation...

The modern university has grown from small scale, elite access institution, growing out of the Enlightenment period in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Freedom to pursue knowledge and ‘dare to know’ was a key characteristic of the Enlightenment university, conceptualised here as Mode 1 Elite Ivory Tower University . The twentieth century saw...

The idea of a modern university is a constantly changing and often contested concept. This paper traces the idea of a university using three modes. These modes are the Mode 1 Ivory Tower, Mode 2 Factory and Mode 3 Network. This framework draws upon higher education literature as well as three modes of knowledge production. I use these modes as a fr...

Creating and disseminating knowledge through research and teaching has long been regarded as the hallmark of the modern university. However, new university business models have called into question the ‘bundling’ of teaching and research, and sustained research on the relationship between teaching and research has found little evidence of an insolu...

Since the turn of this century, much of the world has undergone tectonic socio technological change. Computers have left the isolated basements of research institutes and entered people’s homes. Network connectivity has advanced from slow and unreliable modems to high-speed broadband. Devices have evolved: from stationary desktop computers to ever-...

A challenge for higher education, in the context of the ‘Fourth Industrial Age’, is to prepare students for uncertain futures. Proposed is a model of integrated scholarship drawing on, and developing, Boyer’s scholarship (discovery, teaching, integration and application). We argue that such a model provides a connecting thread between the idea of a...

Technology has dominated discourse on the future university and how digital technologies disrupting wider societal activities can be leveraged in higher education. To gain an insight into UK institutional perspective on technology adoption in teaching and learning and visions for the future, two corpora of text are analysed: Teaching Excellence Fra...

Digital technologies in sport, exercise and health along with every other aspect of human activity have the potential to change practices but also the very discourse and perception of an activity. As technology develops and devices become more ‘smart’, qualitative research requires theories and concepts with which to frame empirical study. Social c...

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA). The paper is collectively written by 15 authors who responded to the question: Who remembers Greta Thunber...

In the UK, higher education (HE) policy discourse over the past 60 years has advocated flexible part-time HE for social mobility, personal development, economic advantage and leisure. However, part-time undergraduate HE in the UK is in steep decline. Against this backdrop, we were interested in how universities promote, or fail to promote, part-tim...

The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is an evaluation of teaching quality at UK universities. The aim of the TEF is to raise esteem for teaching in line with research and recognise teaching excellence. In 2017 all universities who took part in the TEF exercise were awarded ratings of gold, silver or bronze for teaching quality. These awards were...

Digital technologies for learning and teaching have promised much in higher education (HE). There has become, however, a dualism between digital and non-digital and a technological determinism which in some cases promotes digital technologies as being innately superior to the non-digital. There is pressure on universities to provide learning and te...