Miško Šuvaković Epistemology of Art - TkH

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teacher-student relationship, transforms into courseware. Courseware
refers to program package containing plans, programs, summaries, instructions,
tasks, research agendas, references, accompanying video
or audiovisual material etc. Such course can be presented on a Web
page or CD-ROM as a product (by way of purchasing ‘access’) made
available to the student-client. The key issue of ‘university politics’ becomes
who controls ‘access’ to courseware: namely, who takes part in
control and distribution of educational access. Decision-making capacities
are being dislocated from the complex – yet direct – relationships
(comprising the academic world, school boards, human relations between
teachers and students, etc.), into the realm of bureaucratic
execution of ‘educational policies’ through courseware packages administered
by the University and its commercial agents, in accord
with overall investments in education industry. In such constellation
of interests and power, ‘university administrators’ (teachers-administrators,
administrators-managers) assume a leading role in designing
the overall university politics and its singular effects on educational
practices:
„The use of interactive technologies is causing a fundamental shift
away from the physical classroom toward anytime, anywhere learning
– the model for post-secondary education in the twenty-first
century.“ This transformation is being made possible by „advances
in digital technology, coupled with the protection of copyright in
cyberspace“. 178
Administrators control and indeed optimize supply and demand for
courses or packages of study programs i.e. curricula. They, however,
do not rely on the ‘exceptional character of educational practice’,
but on education policies and respective resolutions of contradictions
pertaining to education trade: namely, struggle for survival on competitive
intellectual and cognitive markets. Power in university politics
is concentrated in the hands of administrators-teachers and administrators-managers
who mold challenge and attraction of the curricula.
178 David F. Noble, „Digital Diploma Mills, Part 1: The Automation of Higer Education“,
p. 112.
These changes essentially affect attributes of the work of teacherslecturers
or teachers-instructors. A teacher devoted to Western
humanist tradition had based his work on direct contacts with his
students: he predominantly relied on live performance of teaching
and interaction with individual or collective student subject/s. Such
teaching, above all, implies performing of events which underlie the
educational practice. New interactive and Web technologies effect
transformations of teaching, from performative work to production
labour providing educational or courseware packages marketed by
their administrators through commercially affiliated institutions. Owing
to administrative mediation teaching is disciplined, deferred and
deterritorialized:
Once faculty and courses go on line, administrators gain much
greater direct control over faculty performance and course content
than ever before, and the potential for administrative scrutiny, supervision,
regimentation, discipline, and even censorship increases
dramatically. 179
Technological standardization of courses and study programs leads
to a territory where course development is not governed by artistic
or academic demands, but system solutions verified by standards and
their administrative implementation. In other words, teachers can not
modify their courses without administrative, meaning, organizational/
managerial i.e. market sanctions.
Addressed transformations in university operations, aiming at standardized
educational packages and ‘highly’ controlled administrative
approach to education, advocate the ideal of pragmatic universal and
compatible knowledge available to each ‘consumer’ by means of the
cognitive market. Advantages of online standardized education are
potential deterritorializations and global mobility of the ‘universal’
knowledge, as opposed to site-specific and time-specific confines.
179 David F. Noble, „Digital Diploma Mills, Part 1: The Automation of Higer Education“,
p. 112.