‘Welcome to Columbus College. Is this all your gear?’
‘It’s all I was allowed without paying excess.’
Victoria arrives at the University of Space, Jupiter Moon
‘You're right, Johnny. You know, there are a lot of other kids who feel just the same way you do. They're confused and afraid, but they don't have to be. The problem isn't that other
kids don't like you, it's that they don't understand you, but we do. You're special. You're a latent telepath about to come into full bloom.’
‘My Johnny, a telepath?’
‘Probably, but to be sure, take him down to the Psi‐Corps Testing Centre first thing tomorrow.’
‘How do I find them?’
‘We're everywhere, for your convenience.’
Psi Corps Advertisement, Babylon 5
Victoria was joining the Ilea ‐ a science station in geostationary orbit above a human colony on Callisto, the outermost of the Galilean moons of Jupiter. Jupiter Moon, which aired in the 1990s, followed the lives of the crew of the space station and the students and staff of the Columbus College of the University of Space. As a drama serial, it combined elaborate science with the mundanity of baggage allowances and spaced‐up new‐romantic fashion. At around
the same time, the visually and conceptually much more sophisticated Babylon 5 took us further into the future in a five‐mile‐long Babylon 5 space station, a centre for trade and
diplomacy between colonies in the Earth Alliance and beyond, with the Psi Corps responsible for the wellbeing and also the control of telepathic individuals by whom those without extraordinary psychic powers are identified as ‘mundanes’.
The same term was used recently in a study, publicized in Times Higher Education, of the benefits of technology identified by students, citing one of the co‐authors of the study as saying that there was ‘considerable evidence’ that technology was aiding learning but that it was not always ‘the cutting edge or headline use of technologies but often the more prosaic or mundane’ uses associated with the organization and management of study time and place
(Parr 2015). The findings echo those of Francis (2010), whose ethnographic study also finds that students’ technology use focuses on forming and maintaining context – physical as well as online. But Francis’s conclusions are far‐reaching. He describes the university as ‘decentred’ by
this shift towards learner appropriation of technology toolsets and collaborative networks to the shape and use of which they, and not we, are central. Nothing mundane about that, either for pedagogy or for institutional strategy. How did we not notice it happening
