Understanding the flexible learning workplace as heterogeneous networks

This article describes the use of Actor Network Theory (ANT) to study the development of flexible learning within a faculty at Victoria University. ANT arose out of the studies of the development of science and technology, and seeks to explain situations where scientists and engineers are responsible for the development and implementation of some innovation. In more recent times, ANT has been used to study educational innovation in higher education. ANT's basic assumptions of general agnosticism, generalised symmetry and free association provides a generic framework for bringing the social, economic, political and technological together in an analysis of flexible learning.

ANT treats social relations, including power and organisation, as network effects. A further distinguishing feature of ANT is its assumption that the social world is materially heterogeneous, that is, stories of ordering are embodied and represented within materials we use. In ANT, policy documents, reports, and support material are mobile forms of inscriptions that represent heterogeneous networks. Therefore, this paper discusses possible networks that are represented within policies designed to support flexible learning innovation within the faculty and/or University.

Just as university administrators develop and implement policies to nurture greater flexibility in teaching programs through various heterogeneous networks of people and technology, the academic at the same time constructs their own networks. Academics are therefore described as enrolling the flexible learning policy and guidelines, thereby leading to flexible learning policy being transformed or translated in ANT terms. Of course, the academic may form different associations as they construct their heterogeneous networks.

While it is not new for academics to work within and around university policies, it is argued in this paper that ANT provides both the theory and methodology to represent and investigate the detail of flexible learning policy and innovation within a university. Furthermore, contrasting the various heterogeneous networks informs the discussion about an academic's work and its associations with curriculum, pedagogy and student learning opportunities arising out flexible learning within that university. Such an analysis is possible because ANT characterises innovation as arising out of free association rather than some intrinsic property of policy, people and/or technology.

This paper concludes with an illustration of ANT being used to study flexible learning in a faculty at Victoria University. In particular, policy is found to strengthen associations between academics, faculty budgets, and technology, sometimes at the expense of associations between the student, teacher, curriculum and pedagogy. On the other hand, members of staff typically enrolled by policy develop networks that provide more durable associations between curriculum and pedagogy. Nonetheless there are tensions between budgets, workload, pedagogy, curriculum, people and technology to resolve that ANT makes explicit.