This paper explores the relationships between the technologies deployed in networked and e-Learning and the pedagogies and politics associated with them. Networked learning and the related move to e-Learning are coincident with the globalisation, commodification and massification of Higher Education. It examines the hard and soft forms of technological determinism (TD) found in the current advocacy of technological futures for Higher Education. Hard TD claims that new technologies bring about changes in the pedagogy found in networked learning and that these changes have a socially equalising or democratic effect. Soft TD claims that these changes are not the inevitable outcomes of technology but goes on to suggest that successful use of the technology rests upon exactly the same changes. These changes have been characterised as a ‘new paradigm’ in education
