Knowledge Creation and Organizational Symbioticity in Learning Platforms

We know there remains an ongoing resistance among University staff in the move to ‘going online’ or becoming ‘digital educators’ (Redpath, 2012). Some scholars suggesting that this is down to challenges to the identity of the educator (Hanson, 2009), the competence of teachers to design and implement digital education initiatives ((Englund, 2017) whilst others suggest it is due to the lack of support offered by senior management (Preston, 2018 and others). Our question is has the approach to focus on individual staff resistance, identity and/or competence to the challenges for management education in a postdigital era been the best way to understand the issues faced by staff and institutions alike? Would it instead be more productive to, after Boje, focus on the antenarrative to the pervasive and dominant narrative of educational technology will/is changing higher and management education? Indeed, could the reframing of educational technology narratives as antenarrative help to shed light on other possible futures or counter-narratives?
In this vein, based on recent challenges to the hegemony of Christenson’s 'disruptive innovations' thesis (Watters, 2018) we propose a new avenue of research. A perspective that moves away from a focus on individual staff disrupting or resisting their organization's move to the digital (i.e. based on the rhetoric that digital is the future). We are concerned instead to draw attention to voices that are questioning and challenging the so called digital innovation imperatives and how those voices are important counternarratives to the rhetoric of the shape of the future educational landscape in a postdigital world. Moreover, we are concerned with how there counternarratives are influencing the actions of those who are being asked to engage in digital teaching and learning activities. These voices are important, not least because as Fawns (2018) suggests educational designs and orchestration happens within a social and
material context whatever the form of education practice or media being used i.e. whether it is digital or not.
We believe however that these voices have so far been largely silenced, have remained unaddressed and unattended to by those in power, despite them clearly (from current research on the resistance of individual staff) disrupting the organization's move to become seen as digital educators and providers. We believe that to shed light on those voices and highlight counternarratives to the ‘digital education is the future’ narrative needs to be heard and brought to the foreground in discussions on management education in a postdigital world. This will enable us to understand and explain more clearly, what has so far been interpreted as individual forms of resistance as well as enlighten us more on what has been talked about as the underlying politics of online education.