Networked learning and utopia

Abstract

The corporate infrastructures and policy trajectories of contemporary digital education are rarely seen as utopian. To a significant extent they are extractive, utilitarian, colonising and homogenising. At a historical moment of multiple, intersecting crises, scholarship in networked learning can contribute new methods for imagining and re-building digital education – unpicking its histories, imagining better futures and – ultimately – maintaining hope.This paper uses Levitas’s (2013) ‘Utopia as Method’ as a way to approach this challenge, applying its three-part analytical sequence – archaeology, ontology and architecture – to networked learning and digital education.