Imaging, imagining knowledge in higher education curricula: new visions and troubled thresholds.

It is urgent that we re-examine models of knowledge and knowledge-making within the university, at this time of open learning and deregulated multi-million dollar and euro open science hubs and portals. For otherwise, we are bound into ‘crude’ instrumentalism, ‘delivering’ ‘knowledge packets’ rather than seeing our curricula as potentially transformative (Head in the Clouds and Feet on the Ground.http://www.srhe.ac.uk/events/details.asp?EID=54). This article reflects on two issue-raising colloquia which challenged and reimagined our models of disciplinary knowledge and curricula design: the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) Theory Network ‘New Visions’ symposium and the 4th Biennial Threshold Concepts Conference. Both were linked by a pre-occupation with the visualisation and modelling of knowledge and university knowledge-making: the first looking to Barnett's ‘Structuring Knowledge in an Age of Non-Structure’ and Peters ‘Open Science Economy’ and the second concerned with academic and, now, professional, ‘threshold concepts’; both challenged the way we imagine, and image, knowledge and its incorporation and creation in university curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]