We regard the following as key trends:

Online Learning & Social Media
●    The deep penetration of social and mobile media into everyday life
●    The accelerated provision and uptake of tele-present learning offers (including both cMOOCs and xMOOCs)
●    A proliferation of online-education tools and ‘virtual learning environments’ (to be used in public and private, open and closed settings)
●    A surge of interest in, and research funding dedicated to, pedagogic models which ‘blend’ the classroom environment with computer mediated, or online, environments (‘blended learning’, ‘event based learning’, ‘learning in Second Life’, the ‘flipped classroom’ etc.)
●    The proliferation of non-academic open learning environments, including:

○    self- and peer organised learning (e.g. The Public School)
○    wiki-esque or crowd sourced learning platforms, funded by private capital, for collaborative self-education on general knowledge (e.g. Quora)
○    ‘public-good’ and commercial learning platforms, with newly originated content (e.g. Khan Academy and Udacity)
○    corporate open media education projects with ‘ulterior motives’ (e.g. recruitment, content crowd sourcing, etc.) (e.g. YouTube creator space)

The Open Access Movement, IPR, Piracy
●    The ‘Academic Spring’: after years of lobbying, the open access movement in academe has recently achieved some important victories against proprietary publishing. At the beginning of 2012, 12,000 academics signed a public petition pledging not to support Elsevier journals, either by publishing in them or by undertaking editorial and peer-review work for them, unless the publisher withdrew its support for the Research Works Act, aimed at curbing government mandated open access policies in the US.
●    In a related (albeit qualified) success, David Willetts, the UK Minister of State for Universities and Science, has largely accepted the recommendations of the Finch Report regarding the open access publication of academic work. (The terms of its practical implementation, which include the adoption of a somewhat idiosyncratic version of gold, author-pays, open access, presumably designed so as not to represent a disruptive challenge to the traditional publishing firms, arguably make this a somewhat Pyrrhic victory for much of the open access movement.)
●    The increasing uptake of Creative Commons licensing as a public-domain, open-content legal framework for publishing and sharing cultural and educational content. (For more on Creative Commons, see the section on Creative Commons Critique below.) This has seen Creative Commons steadily permeate nearly all Open Educational Resource (OER) initiatives (as opposed to OE initiatives, many of which are not re-usable).
●    Mainstream promotion of ‘culture sharing’, ‘collaborative working’ and ‘open knowledge’ models by individual advocates and lobbying bodies promoting an ‘open internet’ (cf. Clay Shirkey etc. on the SOPA/PIPA bills; Mozilla; Open Knowledge Foundation, and so forth).
●    The continuing robust health of major players working within traditional, closed IPR or proprietary-infrastructures models, together with their incursion deep into the nooks and crannies of public culture and broadcast institutions (museum image repositories; image, film and text content databases).

●    Struggles over piracy, including take-downs of file-sharing sites and related arrests (e.g. the charges brought by the US government against the digital activist Aaron Schwartz, for his alleged large-scale unauthorized downloading of files from JSTOR academic database, which many believe led to his suicide in January 2013; and the earlier closure in 2012 of the Megaupload website and arrest of its founder, Kim Dotcom, for copyright infringement).
●    Deficient understanding in many professional fields associated with content production of the technicalities of licensing, leading to ‘the blind leading the blind’.
●    The major, de-facto role of piracy in access to educational and cultural materials in the ‘emerging economies’ of the Global South.
●    The withering of the historically intimate relationships between public broadcast and education.

The Student, The University, Knowledge
●    A dramatic increase in student mobility, resulting in global ‘shopping’ for education (the recent tightening of UK visa restrictions notwithstanding).
●    The normalisation of university-level fee-paying study, and state inculcation of massive student debt (estimated to be over $1 trillion in the US alone in 2012).
●    State and corporate investment in lifelong learning agendas and programmes - since their intent is to increase human capital at national and international levels, but in the service of growth, these often exist in disregard of the lived complexities of the material contexts of lifelong learning.
●    Parallel state disinvestment in academic learning (particularly the Arts and Humanities), and even in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects, coupled with a movement away from what has been dubbed ‘blue-sky’ or ‘curiosity-driven research’ (i.e. research with no immediate commercial potential or market application).
●    Anxiety over academic freedom (witness the recent launch of the Council for the Defence of British Universities),  and the ‘purpose’ of a variety of subjects, ranging from philosophy and medieval history to the more esoteric corners of science.
●    In Europe and Canada (i.e. Quebec), social struggles around cuts in public funding for education; street demonstrations, political campaigns grouped around ‘anti-cuts’ messages upholding university education as a public good; higher education provision as an essential function of the welfare state. In Europe and the USA, social struggles around the role of the university as a ‘knowledge factory’; university occupations responding to standardisation (the Bologna process), profit-led conceptions of education and knowledge, lifelong student-debt bondage.

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