Higher education is going through a major digital shift. Platforms, dashboards, AI tools, and data analysis are becoming part of everyday university life, often presented as signs of innovation, efficiency, and modernization. But does digitalization automatically mean educational innovation?
In this podcast episode, I reflect on that question by connecting two important perspectives. On one side, Manuel Castells helps us understand that universities are not changing in isolation: they are part of a broader society increasingly organized through information, networks, and digital systems. On the other, Fernando Pimentel brings the discussion closer to education itself, especially by showing that digital culture is not only about tools, but about changes in how people learn, communicate, and build knowledge.
From this dialogue, the episode explores a central tension: technology can support more autonomy, interaction, and participation, but it can also strengthen monitoring, quantification, and institutional control. So the real issue is not simply whether universities should use digital technologies, but what kind of educational model is being shaped through them.
Throughout the episode, I discuss what we already know about the informatization of society and its relationship with education, the theoretical ideas that help interpret these transformations, some initial hypotheses about the impacts of digitalization and AI, and the ethical, pedagogical, and managerial challenges created when academic life is increasingly translated into data.
This is an invitation to think beyond the usual excitement around innovation and ask a more careful question: when universities become more digital, are they really transforming education, or are they mainly transforming the way it is measured and managed?
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