In a recent article exploring the mirror as metaphor for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education, Angelos Konstatinidis asks ‘what future…we tacitly normalise through the integration’ of AI. In this research paper, we present recent findings on learner experiences of Higher Education, and speculate on possible futures. We argue that through progressively de-placing and de-temporalising HE via ubiquitous technologies such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), we risk shaping a ‘non-student’. The paper stems from ongoing research on students’ concepts of time as it relates to learning, study and assessment. The work was conceived primarily in response to the ongoing ‘crisis of engagement’ across the HE sector, which is often linked to increasing financial pressures on students, leading to greater investment of time in paid work and in commuting. However, our research reveals interesting and under-researched learner beliefs concerning educational technology as a substitute for on-campus learning.

Drawing on our analysis of qualitative data collected via survey and through student interviews, and employing the concepts of non-place, non-time, and non-things, we invite reflection on how, in an accelerating present, we might (need to) reclaim the ‘realness’ – spatial, temporal, and relational – of university experience.

To illustrate an emerging paradigm of studenthood which our work has identified, we focus here primarily on the example of the LMS. Particularly of interest is the taken-for-grantedness of the LMS in the learner imaginary: while some learners report eminently advisable uses such as preparation for lectures to enable better in-class focus and engagement, a significant proportion of learners conceive of the LMS as a substitute for or an alternative to attendance at scheduled learning events. While this may be largely a function of external financial pressures, for instance, it reveals a complex vision of the present where activities typically considered fundamental to the occupation of being-a-student become subject to negotiation, optional, and potentially even non-valuable.

We explore the impact on this progressive de-placement and de-temporalisation of Higher Education on student identity, arguing that in the non-place, interaction and relationality are limited, artefacts (essentially non-things) substitute for engagement, and neither relational resonance nor cognitive friction are experienced fully. These barriers to individual and collective academic identity-formation are discussed in light of our students’ trade-offs between presence and absence. In short, we ask if by operating under conditions of transience rather than permanence, and strategic rather than assumed presence, our deployment of educational technologies may be contributing to the emergence of the ‘non-student’.

Through this discussion of present student conceptions of technology in education, we invite colleagues to reflect on how the atomised experience of education lived by the theoretical ‘non-student’ might be challenged, improved, or, indeed, accommodated.