Modalities, Disciplinarity and Multiliteracies: the digital culture of higher education and the false promise of technological determinism

In this article, I engage with the notion of the COVID-19 pandemic raising more pertinent issues regarding the pre-pandemic discourse on technology use in higher education, often marked by deterministic thinking. Moreover, I will comment on the implications of the social ecosystem of the university, the nature of disciplinarity and knowledge production, and the social production of teachers and learners taking into account the unstable and disruptive conditions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. This even saw innumerable higher education institutions across the globe make a dramatic shift to online learning with very uneven and perhaps precarious results overall. Digital technology in higher education is hardly a magic bullet to address the issue of the sector in light of the realities of the post-COVID world, while it can be leveraged to ensure that some progress is made, as is the case with online teaching moving from a marginal pedagogical practice to a widespread social phenomenon. Online teaching exclusively or even in hybrid mode teaching can present practical issues in terms of how disciplinarity is practiced in addition to how teaching and learning may be conducted. While the institutional reflexivity that is characteristic of late Modernity has led constituents to the higher education system to sector-wide reconsiderations of how tertiary-level study can the best possible social outcomes, there might no longer be the several concrete possibilities or futures to envisage, but rather ambiguous situations that require greater degrees of responsiveness to new information and realities that present itself as ‘new normals’.