Tag Archives: activism

The relationships between technology and open education in the development of a resilient higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 4 November 2010

I thought it would be helpful to write-up that which I spoke about at Open Education 2010 in Barcelona, yesterday. The slides are available on my slideshare, and the paper is also available here on learnex. I spoke without slides, but will create a screenr presentation to cover the main points. You might also like to read this alongside Stephen Downes’ Huffington Post article on Deinstitutionalising Education.

This is pretty much what I said, and it is my story of the last 12 months.

This talk has one caveat and six points. The six points focus on: critique; transformation; sustainability; hope; cracks; and openness.

The caveat is that this paper is presented in the policy and strategy strand of this conference. My role as a reader in education and technology, but also as the academic lead for technology-enhanced learning [TEL] at De Montfort University in the East Midlands of England, enables me to influence institutional policy, practice and strategy. My role is to examine and develop approaches for transforming education and the curriculum within my university. My expertise and experience regards TEL as a part of that transformatory moment of education. But it is not the driver, or the most important element of that moment. My understanding of the place of technology-in-education, and technology-for-open-education informs my approach to policy and strategy. I outline my developing understanding in the six points below.

However, in this developing understanding, one of my previous roles as a researcher and a lecturer in History is important. We need to recover the role of past struggles as we face new crises, to recover the stories of the past, and the radical moments when technology was used to transform education and social relations. This is not a focus on technology and progress, as has been seen in its co-option by a neoliberal educational agenda. Rather it is a focus on technology in the name of progressive, dialogic critiques of our current crises, to suggest and implement alternative moments.

My first point is on critique. Open Education is a critique of our current social forms of higher education. It offers radical moments for the transformation of our lived experiences in higher education. However, through an agenda of consumption, marketisation and commodification, visited through the focus on second-order elements like open educational resources, open education is being subsumed within a dominant paradigm of business-as-usual. This fetishisation of OERs as commodities, as abstracted, intellectual value-in-motion that is to be consumed, diminishes the transformative moment of open education.

My second point is on transformation. The transformative moment of open education is critical because we are in crisis. Climate change, peak oil and resource availability/costs, alongside the  attack on the idea of the public sector in the UK, are symptoms of a deeper crisis of political economy. This is usefully framed by Naomi Klein’s idea of the shock doctrine, where the neoliberal, financialisation crisis is being used to extend business-as-usual and to entrench dominant positions through a focus on economic growth. This is an unsustainable approach. The private and public institutions that catalyse this view are unsustainable. The current forms of higher education are unsustainable. We need to produce transformative moments.

My third point is about sustainability. The hegemonic positions defended through the promise of business-as-usual have assimilated the radical moments of socio-cultural and environmental sustainability. The conversation is now based upon economic growth as sustainability, with a focus on impact measures. Moreover, the radical promise of resilience threatens to be bastardised and turned into a radical conservative focus upon adaptation. In fact the crises we face will overwhelm any attempt to adapt and maintain business-as-usual. Transformatory change should be the focus of resilience. What are we sustaining and why is at issue. Our discussion of OERs linked to economic growth, rather than dialogic encounters with of radical, open education, implicates us in this hegemonic conservation, as it hides the importance of movements of struggle, in the service of the status quo. The status quo is not an option.

My fourth point is about hope. I have hope that new social forms of higher education, and possibly the University, can enable students and teachers to develop the characteristics of resilience and sustainability that are transformatory and emancipatory. These new forms hint at open educational curricula underpinned by radical, critical pedagogy. So we see engagement with student-as-producer, teaching-in-public, pedagogies of excess and hope. The intention  is to enable people to re-cast their lived experiences, and to rethink the production, value and distribution of our common wealth, beyond its accumulation and enclosure by the few. Production is the corollary of consumption. I have hope that we can create radical moments in which we can co-operatively produce our lived experience, rather than simply consuming it.

My fifth point is about cracks. John Holloway argues that it is important to widen the cracks within coercive capitalism, in order to transform moments and institutions for the public good. Open education is a crack in the dominant, neoliberal social forms of higher education. Open education is a crack in the unsustainable models of business-as-usual that exist within higher education. This is important because we are not observing the crisis. We are in the crisis. We are the crisis.

My sixth point is about openness. The theory-in-practice of open education has tremendously empowering, radical moments within it. The struggle for open education is central to transforming our crisis. Open education, open activity, open production, open curricula, open networks, open forms of learning and teaching, are all central to this project. It is important that we develop transformatory moments and re-imaginings of our place in the crisis, and that we openly define and deliver open approaches for resilience and sustainability. We must use open education to reclaim the radical history of education, and technology’s place in education. We must move away from chasing the latest gadget or fetish. We must move away from seeing OERs as value-in-motion, as commodity. We must recover the radical place of technology-in-education from the mundanity of the latest digital development. In this we must revisit and recover the movements and moments of struggle in the past, and the use of technology in those struggles. For me this is a revisiting of the Workers Educational Association, of the Co-operative movements in the UK and in Latin America, of Cuban education after the collapse of the Soviet Union, of community educators like Trapese and the Autonomous Geographers, of anarchist social centres of learning, and of forms of participatory, co-operative education. This is not to say that these are perfect examples, or projects that can be transplanted, but it is to say that they offer radical histories and radical alternatives.

My hope is that we can reclaim open education as a radical moment of struggle, that can transform our experiences in the face of our crises.


Postscript: open education, cracks and the crisis of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 29 October 2010

I’ve been pondering the realities and possibilities surrounding cuts and Browne, based on conversations and reading of the comments to my original piece on open education, cracks and the crisis of higher education. This has been spiked by Leigh Blackall’s point that “Richard stops short of describing alternative approaches, pointing instead to a few worthy projects”. Leigh is correct. As is Martin Oliver in noting that in re-imaging the University as social form, as part of a re-imagining of the forms of our communities/societies, “I’m caught between an idealised and a pragmatic response”.

In part we are left with a soft-and-slow response from within HE, as a few questions are worked out within the confines of business-as-usual. These questions include the following.

  1. What does the cuts and fees agenda mean for our allegedly progressive pedagogies and the roles of the student-as-consumer and the student-as-producer? Will students who are paying £1,000s accept pedagogic models and engagement with resources that are about their production of their curriculum? How will this affect their expectations of the curriculum and their experience of HE? This is more so in the face of a hegemonic view, from business and government, of HE as marketised, and increasingly individualised rather than socially-constructed, commodity. All that work we have done on progressive and radical pedagogies needs to be considered in light of the curriculum-as-commodity.
  2. Will, for example, Band D subjects fair better than Band C, in that the HEFCE subsidy plus fee income will be replaced by a top-level of projected fee in the former, but not in the latter. Will there be cross-subsidy? What will this mean for power relations between subjects within the University, when it comes to the student experience or the allocation for resources or approaches to mechanisms like quality? We already hear stories of powerful faculties claiming they subsidise smaller areas of work.
  3. How can institutions differentiate themselves in the face of fees and cuts? Will their current make-up of Band B, C and D subjects impact how they fare post-2012/13?
  4. What does “the student[s] experience[s]” mean in reality, when we don’t have funding letters and we don’t know how Browne will play out in Parliament? What does “the student[s] experience[s]” mean in reality, when we don’t know what the University is for?

In this I feel that there are possibilities to re-imagine our work. From management within the academy lobbying and positioning is already beginning as a form of protest within the model of business-as-usual. There is a form of critique framed around autonomy and complexity, and a focus upon the institution as social enterprise. On his blog, the VC of the University of Sheffield notes that “In a world of global competition and profound change, we want our children to have more than just bread to live on. And to do that, they will also need to appreciate the value of the full range of knowledge, and why our good colleagues do need, and deserve, some bread.” Note the use of our *good* colleagues. Martin Hall, VC at Salford argues that “Re-connecting with local communities leads to academic excellence and international recognition”, and that “partnership working makes more sense than Darwinian selection”.

This view of developing the University as social enterprise is important within the framework of business-as-usual, and it might enable, for example, DMU to develop its strengths in partnership with Leicester as a global, national and regional exemplar of strategies for partnership, inclusion, diversity. The issue of scale, strengths and also values is critical here. However, this assumes that business-as-usual is an option, which given the radicalisation and marketisation agenda of the coalition, and to which opposition political parties offer limited alternatives, seems of limited value.

Elsewhere we have seen a view that protest through demonstrations or occupations might be the way to direct opposition. In the UK, the NUS and UCU are planning a demonstration on 10 November [which I will be attending] with the strap-line “fund our future”. A danger with this approach is that it disempowers – that it waits for the Coalition to agree that they were wrong and to maintain the status quo ante bellum. In short it isn’t resilient in the face of an ideological attack – it plays their game to their rules on their turf. It is about negation. But it is about the negation of the newly-imposed terms of business-as-usual. It is not about the negation of our negation. It is not about re-imagining higher learning. It is not about what HE is for. If we are in this crisis, and wish to move beyond it, then we have to be against it politically. The key here is radical alternatives and transformation.

Martin Oliver goes on to note in a comment to my original posting that:

“we do need to try out these open forms now. If we can’t work out how to do it – and just as importantly, how to tell credible stories about its value, and about what resources it really needs – then we won’t have it in our repertoire when we need it in the future. We also wouldn’t be able to resist inappropriate versions of that path if we couldn’t spot them and understand what made

“So – where can we start sharing stories about this?”

Martin asks us to re-imagine and share. Some of this re-imagining is possible through, as Leigh Blackall indicates, radicalising our practices within the academy. This includes:

  1. Radicalising the curriculum to engage with issues of transformation in political economy, within and across subjects;
  2. Radicalising the forms of engagement with our partners or stakeholders, by working with them to re-imagine, produce and re-produce, decisions, spaces and activities;
  3. Building active connections with radical, alternative groups at local, national, global scale [social centres, reading groups, the WEA, transitions town movements];
  4. Asking questions about what higher education is for, and what social forms best support its outcomes; and
  5. Using funding calls and partnership-working to enable the academy to develop radical alternatives.

 

The key here is to build and share alternative models, based on negotiated, shared values, that can be realised locally or individually or by communities and which challenge and lay bare the fallacies of the dominant ideology. This testing and sharing of alternatives is oppositional, and is made crucial, not only in the face of economic liberalism, but also in the face of imminent crises like peak oil. Is business-as-usual really viable?

However, this demands that we live the alternative experiences of which we speak in the areas where we exist most fully – those areas where we have expertise or community investment or engagement. These operate at different scales, and in that they might usefully be seen in the context of how to change the world without taking power. This means, for me, in my work with edtech:

  • challenging the views of my institution about its place in the student experience;
  • being critical about pedagogy as a form of life-changing, transformatory production of political economic alternatives, and not just preparation for paying taxes;
  • working with curriculum teams to challenge their views of their pedagogies and the place of technology in that; situating myself against essentialism and techno-colonialism in all its forms;
  • using OERs as a driver for open education and production, co-operation and sharing, against commercialisation and consumption; situating this view of OERs in open education in political economy, against closed, vendor-driven models of education;
  • working to use technology to open the University up as more than a regional, social enterprise, so that it can offer resilient models of organisation and support at scale, against neoliberalism; working with local, regional, national radical partners using technology to develop new models for life;
  • using external bids to develop and share radical ideas with other stakeholders – to frame alternative models; to work in the hope that my decisions and activities challenge dominant positions.

Martin is right that we need to share and make the case for alternatives. That is the next challenge.


Open education, cracks, and the crisis of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 26 October 2010

The Browne Review and the cuts announced in the UK CSR have prompted much heat and some light around the idea of higher education [HE], and the notion of state support for the established social forms of higher education institutions. This is a crisis for those engaged in HE and for whom higher learning is more than economic outputs, and in that the crisis in HE takes on the characteristics of the broader political economic crisis within society.

In the model of coercive capitalism proposed by Naomi Klein, the impact of crisis is used to justify a tightening and a quickening of the dominant neoliberal ideology. This ideology highlights the transfer control of the economy and state or public assets from public to the private sector under the belief that it will produce a more efficient [smaller, less regulatory] government and improve economic outputs. This implies a lock-down of state subsidies for “inefficient” work [Band C and D funded subjects in UK HE], the privatisation of state enterprises in the name of consumer choice, economic efficiency or sustainability [like encouraging the privatisation of HE], a refusal to run deficits [hence pejorative cuts to state services], and extending the financialisation of capital and the growth of consumer debt [like the increase in fees]. What Klein terms the shock doctrine uses “the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters [or in this case the trauma of a structural economic crisis] – to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy.”

In particular we might now revisit the critical work on the neoliberal university, the student as consumer and the marketisation of HE, in order to critique and negate the path that we are pushed towards. This work identifies the types of controlled, economically-driven, anti-humanist organisations that will possibly emerge, and the ways in which oppositional, alternative, meaningful social change might be realised. This connects to the work of Harvey (2010), who argues that there are seven activity areas that underpin meaningful social change.

  1. Technological and organisational forms of production, exchange and consumption.
  2. Relations to nature and the environment.
  3. Social relations between people.
  4. Mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs.
  5. Labour processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects.
  6. Institutional, legal and governmental arrangements.
  7. The conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

These activity areas help educators and students examine how HE might engage with Browne and the CSR’s neoliberal agenda, in order to develop shared, or co-operative alternatives. This re-imaging is critical if we are to remove the emerging iron cage of bureaucracy and technocracy.

Imagining and creating alternatives is critical and might usefully be seen in terms of the dialectics of social change. As the hegemonic view of society radicalises itself, in turn other opportunities for change emerge. Holloway’s ideas of exploiting cracks in capitalism is important here, in seeing how the internal tensions in the dominant political economy offer up possibilities for radical change at very specific moments. Some of these opportunities exist in the more open and radical (Trapese), or the local (The School of Everything), or the co-operative (as outlined in Affinities and within the UK Co-operative College) forms of educational organisation. We do not have to settle for a pre-determined business-as-usual.

This also goes for the University itself, as a social form. One of the key areas that is opened-up for critique and re-imagining is the openness of our social forms of HE, crystallised in-part through technology. An outcome of Browne and the CSR is a shrinking of the institution and a negation of non-economically determined activities, based around efficiencies as a predetermined scale and the consumption of higher learning by students as consumers. It may be that Browne’s focus on the idea of the student gives us a chink here to focus on issues of open identities and open engagement with the institution by its stakeholders. Browne clearly views students as consumers. The report argues (p. 25):

“We want to put students at the heart of the system. Students are best placed to make the judgement about what they want to get from participating in higher education.”

Whilst the actuality and maturity of this view is highly contested, it implies that HEIs should engage meaningfully with their stakeholder’s unique and possibly shared identities, rather than forcing them to adapt to the institutional position. There is a space here within which work on OpenID, OAUTH and more broadly on open educational models might be catalysed. This user-centred work is less about control and moulding of a user’s identity to meet institutional standards and is more about co-operative engagement and sharing.

This view hints at our ability to move away from thinking about technology to thinking about relationships and people, so that technology is just one component within a broader socio-cultural approach to change [as noted by Harvey, above]. So, institutions might work towards being open, rather than branded as, for example, an iTunesU or a Microsoft/Google University. We should be aiming for openness, and allowing users to engage with other (web-based) services in ways appropriate to them. This view connects to that of DEMOS, in their view of The Edgeless University (pp. 54-5) that:

“Technology should be in the service of an ethic of open learning. Just as technology provides ways to open up access to information, there are technological tools to close it off and reinforce existing barriers and potentially inequalities. Wherever possible investment should encourage open standards and avoid overly restrictive access management.”

Brian Kelly highlights clearly the contested nature of the place of technology within higher education in the face of cuts, and the impact on the HE environment. Brian argues that “we will need to accept many changes in order to survive”. Acceptance is not necessarily the view one might take at this radical juncture, if one viewed adaptation through resilience as a possibility. Irrespective of whether demonstrations and protests in support of business-as-usual [i.e. pleas for the same model of state funding], or re-modelling service provision in the dominant economic mode [i.e. re-shaping services in the face of cuts], are viable options, there are alternative forms of social organisation emerging.

In a separate Resilient Nation paper, DEMOS argue that communities have a choice between reliance on government and its resources, and its approach to command and control, or developing an empowering day-to-day, scalable resilience. Such resilience develops engagement, education, empowerment and encouragement. Resilient forms of HE should have the capacity to help students, staff and wider communities to develop these attributes. As technology offers reach, usability, accessibility and timely feedback, it is a key to developing a resilient higher education, with openness (i.e. shared, decentralised and accessible) at its core. Seizing these opportunities to reshape the dominant institutional forms of HE and their ways of operating, in the spirit of promoting co-operation and openness, offers hope.

 

This reshaping is proactive and creative, and is not focused upon crisis planning. It might also focus on the shared production of distinctive services by and for institutions, rather than the consumption of services provided by outsourced providers and a focus upon tying the institutional brand to products and vendors. The recent EDUCAUSE ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology argues that “there is no stereotypical student when it comes to technology”.  Can institutions afford to be stereotypical when it comes to engaging with those students’ and their identities/individuality? This doesn’t mean leaving those students to create their own outsourced personal learning environments. But it might mean an activist role for institutions in building frameworks that are open enough to make sense to the variety of students in their own contexts. The reality and medium-term effectiveness of centralisation or outsourcing of homogenised services is therefore a major issue, in light of the need for institutional uniqueness.

One of the key outcomes of Browne and the CSR is that modularity, rather than homogeneity, in the HE sector will out. Modularity and diversity are key planks of resilience, tied to feedback from key users. Thus the scope, values and visions of institutions are key, and the ways in which social media or technology are placed in the service of those values and that scope is pivotal. George Roberts engages with this idea of the form of higher education, and the ideas raised by David Kernohan’s recent critique of the idea of the University, by asking whether “it may be time for the academy to abandon the institutions which have housed it for the past several hundred years”. George concludes by asking “So, where does the academy go?” This is an important question related to alternative social forms, away from that of the university, and supported by appropriate, distinctive and open technologies. However, this is also a scary question for those wedded to financialised capital through mortgages, debts and consumption.

I have no answer to George’s question here, but I suggest that we need to re-focus our critique in-part on the place of technology in the idea of higher education. David Jones argues that “It’s the focus on the product that has led university leaders to place less emphasis on the process and the people”. We need to address whether an obsession with tools is helpful in the face of crises. I suggest that a discussion and critique of what higher education is for, and how it is actualised has never been more pressing. I suggest that business-as-usual is not an option, and that goes for the determinist use of technology as outsourced, as integrated, as PLE, as whatever. I suggest that we need to offer up alternative views of the idea and forms of higher education, based on shared values beyond acceptance of economic shock doctrines. I suggest that we might focus upon resilience and openness as alternatives, and as cracks in the dominant ideology.


The iPad and the essentialism of technology in education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 September 2010

I was taken with Jane Searle’s paper at ALT-C yesterday on social inclusion and justice, in emerging work with disenfranchised traveller communities. She made several points that resonated for me.

  1. Individual technologies are not culturally neutral, but that it assumes a form, linked to social relationships and power, based on their enculturation. So the possibility exists for technology to be appropriated in different ways by separate communities. This connects into the work of Feenberg on techno-essentialism or determinism, where technology is seen to be an end in and of itself, or where it is seen to be neutral in mediating relationships and outcomes, rather than forming part of a socio-cultural environment that exudes power relationships and can be marginalising. Our language in negotiating with people around their use of technology is crucial in enabling them to make sense of the tools, rather than their being told what to do. A separate outcome is that we critique the immanence of technology.
  2. Engagement with technology for social or learning outcomes takes time rather than being a quick fix, or a desperate search for the next tool as a commodity fetishism. Engagement with the frameworks of participatory action research gives us a framework for using technology over-time with communities. We need to fight to work long-term with communities of practice, rather than implementing to achieve the deterministic outcomes we need to satisfy impact-assessors and leaving again. This is a real risk of technologically-driven projects that are not socio-culturally rooted – that they become part of an obsession with short-term, positivist, outcomes-driven agendas.
  3. We need to look for cracks within which we can resist the demands of coercively competitive funding mechanisms, which are linked to governmental whim or that of experts, for short-term impact measures that force us as practitioners or technologists to collude in our own alienation from the subjects of our research/practice. Meaningful impact is social and personal, and true emancipation at this level, rather than simply coercing individuals to gain qualifications for jobs, ought to be our focus.

Jane highlighted the need for a critique of social practices, focused upon the uses to which technology was put, rather than “cooing” of the latest shiny tool. For me, one example is the way in which our view of the iPad is a mirror of our broader critique. Several practitioners have begun to engage in the learning possibilities for the tool, and one programme at Notre Dame in the US is using the tool extensively. However, big questions still surround the technology.

  • Factories in which the iPad is made in China have seen an abuse of workers’ rights, physical injuries and disturbing levels of suicide. To what extent do we dissociate ourselves and our use of this tool from those outcomes? This is a logical outcome of coercive competition, cost-cutting and late modern capitalism. However, we have individual and community agency to put pressure on Apple over these outcomes, and to reject the use of the technology. What should be done?
  • The threat of peak oil is growing, as highlighted in the recent, leaked German military report. Oil and coal are embedded in the production process for the tools that we consume from abroad. Is this sustainable? In this case we also outsource our consumption of carbon to China, without bearing the full cost. Is this morally right?
  • To what extent does the use of the iPad reinforce a pedagogy of comsumption, based in-part on Apple’s focus on Apps based development? This also threatens the idea of the open web, further impacted by the recent Google-Verizon deal. Again these technologies are not neutral – by engaging with them we reinforce others’ power-over us, the dominance of their cultural perspectives, and their enclosure of what was previously more open.
  • A second angle to the pedagogy of consumption is the almost constant need to search for the latest, newest technological innovation. This obsession with the next thing, rather than on enhancing or challenging or reforming the social relationships that alienate or marginalise some, needs to be critiqued. We are so scared of falling behind [what/who?] that we risk abandoning our responsibilities to a wider set of communities, and to a planet that contains finite resources.

Social exclusion and digital Britain


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 27 April 2009

Amongst all the heat surrounding Australia’s move towards being a broadband nation [with the project cited as “nation-building”], and the UK Government’s attempts to lever the same in its proposed UK broadband network, I came across Helen Milner’s slides on Digital Inclusion The Evidence from the April 2009 National Digital Inclusion Conference in London [thanks to @joannejacobs].

Milner highlights how socio-economic groups DE, those with poor education and low educational aspirations, alongside older people and those with low technological confidence, are marginalised and excluded from the benefits of technology, that include:

She also re-focused my thinking about how marginalisation and exclusion from a broadband, networked world is reinforcing the indicators of poverty that include high-levels of children, pensioners, disabled-adults, single adults and those in social housing, and where low levels of parental educational attainment are still impacting on child poverty. In turn this impacts on our ability to engage more people with technology to help more people lift themselves out of poverty because “the other resources available to the family are also important” [ Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Consultation response: ‘Ending child poverty: Making it happen’] in helping to achieve this aim. These other resources include meaningful access to technology.

For Universities to make a difference this means allocating resources to generate local engagements with schools and colleges and community groups, to ensure that social capital is valued and enhanced within communities. It also demands targeting low income and aspiration groups, not necessarily in order to manufacture or create demand for HE programmes, but because it is the right thing to do for institutions that might look globally but which are rooted locally.

Helen Milner reminds us all that universites have a powerful role to play in bringing forward projects that enable communities to utilise technologies for capacity and capability-building, as well as for community development. They should be able to affect policy but as importantly also practice, and as well as looking to Government for policy, ideas and financial frameworks, they should look to communities for voluntary activism and local engagement with social justice. This is more than the engagement of specific HE-based research and development departments or institutes, and is a core responsibility of Universities, who are perfect partners as schools and community groups attempt to raise performance and aspiration, with technology-enhanced activism at the heart of the matter.


Digital inclusion, education and the future of the web


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 6 May 2009

I recently blogged about Social exclusion and digital Britain, focusing upon how Universities should be engaging in partnerships with local communities, in order both to enhance learning literacies that are facilitated by technologies and to help create spaces within which those communities can empower themselves.

Having attended a lunchtime paper on Digital Citizenship, hosted by our LGRU and delivered by Karen Mossberger from the University of Illinois, I’m now convinced that this is more vital. In particular, Karen highlighted how the indicators of poverty also impacted digital citizenship, access to IT and broadband, and information literacy. She highlighted the disenfranchisement of poor neighbourhoods (in Chicago in her studies) and poor minority groups. However, much of her work focused upon a Web1.0 view of the world, with analysis of (PEW-based) data from pre-2003. The technological world has moved on so much more since then, with a focus now upon emerging issues like:

  • Social networks and networked literacy;
  • Mobile technologies;
  • Organisation of niche or issue-related associations, and communities of practice; and
  • Semantic web and cloud computing, that affect the management of networks and content.

Engaging with these emergent issues, the work carried out by NGOs like Amnesty and Oxfam is at once participative, devolved, deliberative, and activist to different people, who are able shape and personalise their involvement within different associations. This personalisation helps build communities of practice that stand beyond local and national government, and exists as a participative activity for different people in different ways. For instance, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs can all be used in conjunction with an organisation’s own website or portal to arrange, report, disseminate and organise. The National Digital Inclusion conference recently kept non-attendees up-to-date using the Twitter hashtag #ndi09, whilst HopeNotHate use their own portal, linked to mobiles and email, to organise electoral activism across the whole East Midlands.

These new ways of working do not necessarily engage the technologically, culturally or politically disenfranchised, but they do offer new models for building social capital and civic engagement. Of course there is scope for those in power to use digital participation to maintain their own traditional agendas. This is witnessed by Number 10′s YouTube channel, and the use of digital data to monitor environmental protesters. This paradigm is also evident in The Future Internet: Web 3.0 presentation hosted by the Learning Technologies team at NUI Galway, which focuses upon how the web and our use of it can enable business and the economy. The danger is that it offers no new ways of working, just ways in which extant companies can gain efficiencies and market themselves to new audiences. There is no radical or progressive hope here.

Perhaps a more hopeful view for the future internet is building social capital and social enterprise, and enabling new communities of practice to grow. This is especially the case for education, where new ways of working and engaging with the emergent issues noted above offer hope for a newer, more radical pedagogy that is built around personally meaningful access, enquiry, mentoring, decision-making and action. This is framed by a promise of enhanced social [educational] capital and our ability to nurture new communities of inquiry. These stand against attempts by established organisations, including lecturers and Universities, to lever old ways of working into the use of new technologies and the new communities of practice that emerge.

These issues need to be addressed in light of the demands for flexibility in curriculum design and delivery, alongside, and not separate from the need for more active engagement with digital inclusion agendas. We have the spaces to discuss issues of power and control, participation and civic responsibility, and these can be led by Universities, as part of an engagement with students, voluntary groups, social enterprises and business. I’m just not sure that a traditional analysis of education, inclusion and the future of the web, focused on traditional models of engagement, development and participation, are relevant or helpful. In inspiring social and educational inclusion, we need are more progressve, radical evaluations, visions and proposals.


Towards a radical manifesto? The Impact of Web 2.0 on HE


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 15 May 2009

I have finally re-read the Report of an independent Committee of Inquiry into the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies. From the report I am particularly taken by the following statements/outcomes, which have ramifications for our policy, practice[s] and culture[s]. I am especially interested in the connections between these areas as they impact our ability to re-define a radical pedagogy for empowering our learners, wherever they are on a continuum of engagement with technology. The key is making the world a better place.

1.    The impact of pre-HE pedagogies and technologies

This may be the single most important area that will impact HE practitioners. The report notes two key factors:

“Present-day students are heavily influenced by school methods of delivery so that shifts in educational practice there can be expected to impact on expectations of approaches in higher education”

“The digital divide, the division between the digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, has not been entirely overcome and persists in several dimensions: in access to, and engagement with, technology; the capability of the technology; and in individual competence.”

Issues of marginalisation, disempowerment and disengagement by accident, status or design are still very real. They connect into Helen Milner’s recent work on social inclusion and digital technologies and her Next step for the digital inclusion manifesto. They are also impacted by the development and extension of the precepts within the Early Years Foundation Stage Strategy, which is in itself a manifesto for: inclusion; child-centred practice; productive, learner-defined and owned personal learning environments; a new politics of praxis within and beyond the classroom. The time is ripe for a reappraisal of the value[s] of Bandura, Dewey, Illich, Rorty, integrated with the work of Ronald Barnett.

As digital identities are developed and better understood, as libraries, community centres, social enterprises and schools extend coverage, and as access via mobiles broadens and depends, HE has a duty to ensure that its practitioners are not playing catch-up. This is especially important in the pedagogic cultures that drive programme teams, both in their definition and scoping of curricula, in their involvement of students-as-mentors, and as a result in the power relationships that exist in the learning space that a learner defines. Enabling learners to manage their place in a set of cultures and ask questions at key moments of transition – to their enrolment or registration, in their modes of assessment, in migrating between levels 1 and 2 or between levels 2 and 3 – are critical for good-enough educators who have to support the student in her/his integration of the disparate facets of HE study for her/his own development.

2.    The impact on staff

The report notes that:

“Staff capability with ICT is a further dimension of the digital divide… Tutors are central to development of approaches to learning and teaching in higher education. They have much to keep up with, their subject for example, and developments in their craft – learning and teaching or pedagogy. To practise effectively, they have also to stay attuned to the disposition of their students. This is being changed demonstrably by the nature of the experience of growing up in a digital world.”

Programme teams are crucial in setting a context and ethos within which students can become themselves and succeed. The academic as lone ranger in embedding technologies helps no-one, least of all the student. The student’s integration of the HE and subject environment into their self-concept as a learner who can achieve, demands that programme teams frame their learning activities and subject context around a cohesive digital environment. Too often this is missing at HE.

3.    Developing information literacy

The committee highlight that:

“providing for the development of web-awareness so that students operate as informed users of web-based services, able to avoid unintended consequences. For staff, the requirement is to maintain the currency of skills in the face of the development of web-based information sources”.

The higher-level speaking and writing skills that Bloom developed in his cognitive taxonomy are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. Flexible pedagogic development, the impact of diagnostic assessment, peer-mentoring and enquiry-based learning are critical here. Equally important is engaging learners in the context and actuality of publishing data and argument for the wider world to utilise and judge. Issues like those raised by JISC Legal are critical in framing such a set of developments, but the reality of information literacy cannot be divorced from the reality of integrating and developing a digital identity. Critically this has to be linked to decision-making and action in the world. Problem-based learning may be a key.

4.    Change in HE

“The world [students] encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. Characterised broadly, it is hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured. The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change. They aren’t demanding different approaches; rather they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications. Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary if higher education is to continue to provide a learning experience that is recognised as stimulating, challenging and relevant.”

The last sentence bears rethinking. It should drive all we do in the coming months. At DMU it will certainly shape our re-definition of our e-learning [technology-enhanced learning] strategy and develop a plan its implementation, with our students, and our e-Learning Co-ordinators and Champions. It is critical that we evaluate our professional development approaches and the technologies we support.


Technology-enhanced learning: the emergence of ideology?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 9 September 2009

ALT-C 2009 is billed as “in dreams begins responsibility”. The first day got me thinking about responsibility linked to rights and roles within a shared value system. This was amplified by the main messages that I took from Michael Wesch‘s keynote. Wesch highlighted the work of Charles Taylor on The Ethics of Authenticity and the emergence:

  1. of self-centred modes of self-fulfillment; and
  2. of the apparent negation of all horizons of significance.

Wesch went on to note that these two outcomes of late modernity led to disengagement and fragmentation amongst the citizenry, with individuals flocking together over specific issues rather than aggregating in persistent blocks.

This view of flocking for a purpose maps onto public policy research into associational democracy, where deliberation over issues occurs within and across associations of apparently fragmented people or groups,  and where affiliation may become a powerful connector. The work of Bauman on liquid modernity and Barnett on the need to rethink the relationship between the institution and the individual informs this complexity of this debate, as fragmentation and disengagement loom.

This view of 21st century HE is messy and complex. It aligns with both the DEMOS report on The Edgeless University, which suggests that Universities have to rethink their roles, values, and purposes, including their affiliations, and the recent SOMUL working papers, which develop the concept of parallel universities existing within the same physical and virtual space. To reiterate, the headlines here are: that managing and living within 21st century HE is messy and complex; that our working roles are messy and complex; and, that our responsibilities are messy and complex.

Wesch went on to talk about his teaching and learning strategy trying to overcome a “participation gap” between his students and his curriculum, and therefore him. The value I take from this is the power of relationships that enable learners to define themselves. New media are important because they offer the opportunity to build new relationships and ways of working, and thereby, in Barnett’s terms, to become themselves as an agent in the world. This is crucial because it aligns with the work of Winnicott on the value to the individual of an enabling environment where s/he can be held whilst making sense of the world. This act of holding is based on trust and engagement within a secure space, that is engaging and not fragmented. Both the environment and the relationships have to be good-enough to enable the individual to make sense of themselves and what they feel and want to achieve.

This is important beyond ALTC 2009 because the responsibility is for individuals at all levels within an institution, or a society, or an association, to be good-enough in their relationships to enable others to decide and act, within a set, or sets, of shared values. This accepts a range of desires, hopes, confidences, expertise etc across an institution, with that institution able to hold the individual whilst s/he makes sense of her/his place in it.

The institution’s ability to hold its associates, affiliates, staff, students etc. is tricky. However, this demands that it configures its services, technologies, information, policies around a vision of what it stands for and what it intends to do in the world. All other conversations are secondary to this, even if every university is trying to do and stand for the same thing. We still need a set of ideas that we are responsible for and can take action around. In short we need an ideology for HE, in an age when we allegedly run the risks of disengagement and fragmentation that atomise our needs and experiences.

The impacts debates for learning technologists, or e-learning co-ordinators, or heads of technology-enhanced learning because these people have the responsibility to enfranchise those they support in-line with a meaningful vision. All else, from discussions of progressive pedagogies to the technologies that support them, from how to frame enabling contexts for learning to the information we need to make decisions and the policies that are in place to govern those decisions, is secondary. In fact the clear danger is that with no ideology we become reductionist in our view of technologies, and that we predetermine the tools we will prioritise and sell based on personal whim or fragmented context. The allied danger is that we are determinist about why this tool works and that one does not. This carries over into the discussion over VLE-PLE where concepts like marginalisation, participation, democracy emerge but are not deliberated. We then risk the twin dangers:

  1. that we declare the PLE to be democratic and inclusive without assessing whether it disempowers some people, and the VLE to be controlling without appraising how it enables. One risk is technological dogma; and
  2. that we negate the very flexibility to which we claim to aspire because we close down certain avenues.

In fact, it may be that technologies are both transient and transitional in their use within and beyond curricula, for individuals and groups, as they gain and lose utility. A tool or toolset is useful where it enables me to achieve something in a specific time and increase my self-awareness and move on. However, the lack of proper deliberation over values, ideas and ideologies damages our debates over responsibility.

Technologies then amplify other more critical issues around:

  1. ideology and what we stand for;and
  2. power and control.

Technology changes nothing without a reappraisal of the “why” of HE. The responsibility of learning technologists or educational developers or heads of technology-enhanced learning is to work with senior managers on their vision for their institution, and to align technologies to that vision. Otherwise all we do is chase the next new tool or toy or trend, whilst perpetuating the mythology that innovation is stifled by large institutions and their administrators and that we are somehow better placed if we are counter-cultural.

A central element of this is to engage with Wesch’s view of the flock, and the development of a new localism that aligns tools and approaches to the needs of local communities or associations of practice. These local groups might be module teams or programme cohorts, or networks of e-learning champions, or departmental staff or faculties. An institutional ideology that enables localism augments the view of parallel universities, and of the local needs that so often pervade devolved institutions. In turn this demands flexibility in the deployment of technologies and our engagement with staff or communities of practice. Managing this flexibility demands that those responsible for technology-enhanced learning ask why, rather than how, and begin a deliberation around the ideologies they are confronting or supporting or enabling.


Taking forward change in technology-enhanced education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 1 April 2010

I had a great day yesterday in Bolton at a JISC-sponsored Strategy Cascade event for institutional teams, which was focused upon “the wider debate around what technology can offer our institutions, and how to most effectively harness technology in ways that are sensitive to the specific needs of institutions” and their stakeholders. The session, led by Keith Smyth from Edinburgh Napier and Mark Johnson from the University of Bolton, was an excellent example of grounded, deliberative action. It focused upon achieving an institutional understanding of the contested nature of technology-enhanced learning [TEL] as HEIs struggle to review their strategies and plans.

I was asked to kick the event off with some thoughts on the issues that I see as important in this debate. My slides highlight my activist, political position around the highly contested nature of the value of TEL, and against techno-determinism. The key themes I wanted to highlight were as follows.

  1. Values: do we understand the place of TEL in the idea of the University. Do we recognise and debate our institutional or educational or personal or humane values? How do technologies help us to realise or diminish these values? How do technologies impact the social relations that emerge around these values?
  2. Disruption: we are experiencing disruption, the scale of which may prove overwhelming. This is focused upon: massive public sector debt that will impact our spaces for action and activity; the realities of climate change science, which ought to affect our engagement with technology; peak oil and energy prices/security, which will impact our use of technology and our approaches to resource management; the impact of personal technologies on power and control at the centre or the boundaries of formal and informal classroom and curriculum settings, and the concomitant need for critical pedagogies; and the impact of non-institutional technologies on the value, place and space of the institution.
  3. Contestation 1: the policy and implementation landscape demonstrates complexity of use, expectation and delivery of educational technology within competing value-sets and practices. One space in which this is made manifest is the discussion over open educational resources, as a rider for discussions over the openness of higher education and HEIs that are [being set-up to be] competing. This discussion ought to take place against an ideological and political [small ‘p’] backdrop, which looks at what we stand for institutionally and societally.
  4. Planning: in thinking about institutional change Mark Johnson highlighted the work of Richard Gombrich [after Karl Popper] in developing approaches to piecemeal social engineering. I am concerned with how we are able to provide secure core institutional spaces that enable staff and students to position and become themselves, and to act in the world. Mark Stubbs at MMU has blogged about a vision of joined-up systems that is a powerful description of how institutions can support individuals in making sense of their institution [socially, administratively and academically], by aligning key events, data, processes and technologies, and how “mavericks” [an emergent participant-generated term] can be encouraged to innovate around the edges of the HEI within a supportive set of spaces. In taking this forward we need to see change as institutionally-led, and so as more than a project: it is a programme of work focused upon catalysing flexibility, diversity, modularity and feedback, which then delivers benefits aligned to key outcomes. At DMU we are developing a portfolio of projects to engage this approach.
  5. Contestation 2: we need to know more about the interplay between notions of personalisation and models of the curriculum. In thinking about this I highlighted some DMU examples of: mentoring as a key concept in learning design; thinking around technologically-flexible and modular “curriculum learning environments”; and recasting spaces for life-wide learning opportunities, where students can demonstrate activity in the world, and be accredited for it. This is complex and ill-understood, and techno-determinist approaches to its management are problematic.

I ended by focusing upon a series of issues related to power and emerging self-awareness and action. In particular, I was concerned to reflect upon whether institutionalised approaches reclaim and neutralise innovation within traditional, safe paradigms, and whether this neutralises agency. I wondered whether we know enough about the specific strategies that are deployed by learners using social media, as they become resilient learners and citizens. Finally I wondered whether we acknowledge and care for those who are marginalised or who risk marginalisation though our curriculum practices and values.

The activities that the participants undertook were focused upon: realising the value of different perspectives in the change agenda; our aspirations and who sets the agenda for change; the tensions between monolithic approaches and enabling diversity; and whether we do the simple stuff well enough to enable people to undertake meaningful activity. I was left with three key points that I wished to make as a plenary, with one caveat. These are captured in this Strategy Cascade plenary presentation.

However, I also added that we have travelled a long way in the last decade, in terms of developing the tools and communities that can engage with critical pedagogy and challenge the development of educational norms. There is much to hope for in this celebration of the possible.


The political economy of openness in HE: or what is the point of it all?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 April 2010

I’ve been quite taken with the emerging discussions around openness and transparency in HE, the creation and management of open educational resources, and the concomitant lack of a discourse around open governance in HEIs. In particular I am interested in why there is a focus on the mechanics, rather than the ideologies, cultures and political economics, of openness, and whether this is a function of educators colluding in their own coercion.

This notion of colluding in coercion, in acting in ways that either overtly or unquestioningly maintain dominant power and economic relationships, exists at several levels: the individual, the discipline, the institution and the sector. One example of such collusion was been picked-up by Joss Winn, who highlighted the place of parallelism through which higher education and its programmes of work set agendas that mirror dominant economic models:

“we collude in our own oppression… [even suggesting that] new autonomous spaces needed to be created apart from the agenda of neo-liberal education… [our] parallelism would still serve the interests of the State by removing the responsibility of funding ‘uneconomic’ subjects. In effect, parallelism would act as a form of efficiency under the neo-liberal agenda.”

Economically inefficient courses or items of content or ways of working risk being cut by institutional managers, even in programmes of openness, because they are working to or in parallel with the core economic values of the State. In the same way, we fund projects that are aligned with the view of those who are qualitatively dominant – *our* values are set by those with power, rather than by way of deliberation with the quantitative majority.

This issue of power is important because it speaks of values, inclusion and justice, and is amplified by the traction within society that openness, in terms of data and government, is gaining. Clearly for some HEIs this is subjugated within a dominant economic paradigm. However, openness is also emerging throughout the practice of higher education, and in programmes of work around open education, like the JISC OER programme. Catalysing a culture and set of values around openness offers spaces for cultural reinvention, which offer opportunities to re-fashion social relationships. Thus, whilst at the moment, for example, the Humanities OER project Humbox, with its wealth of open resources, overtly demonstrates a focus on staff, peers and disciplines, and tends to paint learners as objects who have content made for them, or made available for them, it offers a valuable space or catalyst for the socio-cultural re-invention of higher education. The issue is whether we have the will to do this re-invention.

Joss Winn makes this point in his call for a manifesto for sharing, when he eloquently argues that “sharing doesn’t need institutionalising”. In quoting a paper by David Noble, which argues that universities are responsible for “the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property”, Joss notes “that by institutionalising OERs, we’re producing constraints that go against sharing. Scaling up the production of OERs to an institutional level where sharing is considered in terms of an IP Policy, business case, marketing and ‘best practice’ will kill the potential that already exists to share.” Moreover Joss argues that this is alienating precisely because “[it] is just another way of creating capital out of immaterial labour.” We collude because we legitimise the role of the institution or the discipline in taking surplus value from our own labour, or that of our students when we co-create.

Debating and fighting for the idea of the University, infused with and by a culture of openness, is vital, and that resistance might usefully be centred on deliberating the social relations that enable learners and tutors to manage disruption, rather than situating OERs within “the adoption of appropriate business models” that may ultimately be alienating. In situating openness as a form of cultural production, a recent EDUCAUSE paper, Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time!, argues that “Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge“. They state that the value produced for students and the control of the mode of production are central elements of a meaningful experience in Universities. The authors quote Charles Vest’s view that “a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms” is central. However, they then focus upon shared course content and connections, rather than negotiated ownership and co-governance.

It is this notion of co-governance that ought to be central to the development of openness and its value in the idea of the twenty-first century University. One proactive example is the Really Open University’s ideologically-driven stance on the need for praxis, in re-asserting the idea of the University as a site for critical action, resistance and opposition, lead by students. This aligns with the model for organic intellectual endeavour proposed by Gramsci, in challenging institutional or state-legitimised power and hegemonic ideologies, through an engagement with, and challenging of, values and attitudes. What is required in this view is counter-hegemony, a counter-culture in which we deliberate and re-assert the social, rather than economic, obligations that drive us, and through which we focus upon social rather than economic enterprise.

So, is re-invention of the production of content, by enabling the mechanics of re-use, the key issue? Or rather is it more important to re-think and change the rules of the game? It is clear that established corporate and industrial models dominate the discourses around openness. So we see the Open Data and Open Gov movements colonised by corporates, or those seeking to gain from traditional political economic models, which are generally focused upon re-use of content rather than re-invention of models of power. It is necessary then to fight for the prioritisation of people over organisations or business models, and against the use of open agenda for “online opinion research and consultation”.

More important for me are the legitimation of our social obligations and a move towards the commons, catalysed through acts of sharing and underpinned by a deliberative, shared socio-cultural values or co-governance of the means of production. In an excellent article on Twitter and Copyright Shinen argues that “creators needed incentive to create” and generally Copyright Acts frame this incentivisation financially . But what if incentivisation could be re-shaped as social or cultural, and be defined democratically?

One of the positive outcomes of the angst over the Digital Economy Bill (#debill) might to be a renewing of praxis, framed by shared socio-cultural values, with educators acting as conduits for production and in resistance to the alienation that is enforced through a business model that legitimises domination of production. This would truly align with Raymond Williams’ view of the power of the cultures that are publically defined and fought for, and that enabling social transformation. In the debate on openness we are in danger of losing sight of the interaction between political, economic and cultural forces, and the possibilities that openness can be a site of resistance against established norms that have lead us towards crisis, or which at least seek to oppress.

The ideas both of oppression and control of the value of content and the means of producing and sharing it, can be read into the reaction to the #debill farrago. Mike Butcher noted the telling use of the term “likely to be used” in the Amendment to Clause 8 of the Digital Economy Bill: “a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright” will lead to disconnection. The economic model defined by business, rather than one framed by social relations, won out. The language of consumers and industry used by MPs in the Digital Economy Bill, is just the same as the language deployed within HE about the relationships between students and institutions by those in power, which we hope will be socially-constructed but that are increasingly infused with economic determinism.  What hope for co-governance here, especially when the dominant discourse is co-creation or co-production, which risks objectifying students?

In this we should forget the issue of whether access to the internet is a basic human right – this is an incredibly problematic statement and risks diminishing the struggle for true human rights as enshrined in the European Convention and the UN Declaration. However, there is an increasing unease about the possibilities for openness and truly open governance, where societal values clash with those of business, and this stretches beyond #debill. Chris Marsden makes an interesting point around control of the web and net neutrality, arguing that #debill is an affront to that, and when taken with the  recent ruling in favour of Comcast versus the FCC over net neutrality in the US, we might see this as reflecting increasing confrontation over the control of web-based means of production. The Open Rights Group certainly begins to make that case, in arguing for democracy and transparency.

In reclaiming the spaces for openness we might usefully revisit the histories, cultures and values of the Commons. This is important because overcoming disruption and enabling justice lies in shared values, and as Joss Winn argues, we achieve this not through “institutionalising sharing, but by sowing the humanity in sharing; the joy of giving and receiving; the immaterial wealth of knowledge that already exists and the pleasure of creating social relations that resist the organising principle of private property and wage labour.” We need to question continually the extent to which we collude in coercion.

One of the drivers for the emerging discussions around openness and transparency in HE, and the creation and management of open educational resources role, should be the socio-cultural praxis around co-governance. This needs to highlight issues of legitmation and alienation, of value and active participation in practical life. We need to move beyond objectifying the student as co-creator or co-producer to celebrating our shared, subjective deliberation of democratic governance. Through such an approach, the idea of the University might come to be re-framed as active, creative, self-aware and socially-constructed. Moreover it might also tap into the joy and passion of mentoring learners, and of developing truly transformative spaces that change lives. Our approach to openness ought to stand against the production of diminished or controlled spaces, impacted by business models and metrics, which in-turn focus instrumental engagements.

In standing against the economic ideology of openness, and in support of our shared, deliberative democratic values, we might consider and add to the manifesto stared by Joss Winn.

  1. A commitment to transformation and solidarity
  2. Learning our own histories and not his-story
  3. Starting from daily reality
  4. Learning together as equals
  5. Getting out of the classroom
  6. Inspiring social change

The momentum being developed around the idea of openness, through resistance to #debill or threats to net neutrality, or the opportunities of OER programmes, offers us sites for resistance and hope. The question is whether we have the energy to deliberate and then fight for our shared values in the idea of the University.