Introduction: literacy, the digital, and the university

This book constructively problematises the relation between digital communication, literacy, and learning in post-compulsory education, and establishes the need for a truly critical pedagogical research and development agenda that is capable of shaping the ‘digital university’ as an academic as well as an economic enterprise. The contributions in this volume make visible the complexity of the relationship between learning and social practice in a digital world. They expose the inadequacy of skills-based conceptualisations of literacy to support principled pedagogical approaches at this level, but equally they show that established perspectives on literacy as textual, as social action, and as ideological, face major challenges in accounting for the textuality of the digital domain, and its relationship to social power