Beyond Cuts and Taxation: Critical Alternatives and the Idea of Higher Education

December 7, 2011
Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 28 March 2011

The slides for this workshop are available on my slideshare.

Introduction: beyond cuts and taxation

In a recent workshop on the alternative to cuts, DMU’s Sally Ruane argued that if the UK’s structural deficit [as opposed to its national debt] demanded immediate governmental response, then that response needed to focus upon taxation as a cipher for our shared, common wealth and values. Rather than driving through cuts to public services, which marginalise those living in poverty, the pivot should be on overcoming tax avoidance and tax evasion. Sally’s focus was on humanising our system of economic governance through mechanisms tied to social justice and inclusion. Connected to the Keynesian realities that emerged beyond the New Deal, which was subsequently attacked intellectually by the Chicago School in the 1970s and seeded politically by the Thatcherite-Reagonite consensus, Sally began to imagine an alternative that re-focused our social relationships on alternatives shared-in-common, and based around recalibrating the existing capitalist system. Rather than a political re-imagining of the world as it might be, the argument was that there is a more limited, humane economic agenda for which we might fight.

Sally’s arguments rightly connected issues of social injustice, highlighted in part by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, about the lack of redistribution in the coalition’s political economy, to public outrage about our banking system, and to a series of questions about what is to be done as a result. Functional, solutions have emerged from the left, including: a Green New Deal and no- or de-growth [proposed by the new economics foundation]; the public shaming of tax avoiders [the praxis of UK Uncut]; and, the development of co-operative facilities for managing debt, like Eurobonds [promoted by Stuart Holland]. These solutions argue for compassionate or progressive capitalist approaches, but they do connect economic drivers to issues of governance and politics, a connection that is missing from so much of our public discourse, which is too often reduced to cuts versus taxation.

Yet, as Stuart Price noted in the first workshop, we have a catastrophic cleavage in the condition of our democracy, where the electorate can be undermined by coalition manifestos produced in negotiations after the fact, and which move us to a position where we are disempowered through shock as both our public services and our shared resources held in common are disembowelled. This subsumption of our politics to the realpolitik of the state, managed through shock therapy, is reinforced through what George Lambie highlighted as the power of the transnational flows of [finance] capital over that state apparatus.

It is this role of the state as a key vehicle for capital, nested within a neoliberal discourse that is the cornerstone of what Marx called the “real subsumption of labour to capital”, which I wish to investigate in this second seminar. In particular, I wish to look at the dominant narrative that now subsumes higher education within the needs of transnational capital, or what Hardt and Negri have termed Empire, for, amongst other things, profit maximisation, accumulation by dispossession, increases in the rate of profit, and a furtherance of consumption as the motive force behind growth. As one of the occupiers at University College London argued, “this is about more than education.” In this I want to begin to relate the real subsumption of higher education to the capitalist logic of domination, inspired by the work of Deleuze, Negri and Tronti [among others] on the social factory.

So this seminar is in four parts. In the first I look at the hegemony of neoliberal dogma within higher education, in order to ask whether liberal versions of business-as-usual are viable. In the second I try to relate this dogma to the current crisis of capitalism, in order to demonstrate how higher education and its actors are being deliberately brutalised by the state, through the deployment of pedagogies of both debt and the kettle, as a form of shock therapy. In this brutalisation, hopes that progressives can mollify the system against tax evasion and against the cuts risk a lack of traction. In the third part I briefly place higher education in the context of global flows of capital and the impact of shock through internationalisation on our environmental crisis. In the final part, I wish to explore alternatives, in order to ask whether, in Holloway’s terms it is possible to be in-and-against the dominant logic of capital, and to imagine moving beyond its alienating immiseration. Is it possible that autonomous alternatives and refusals to be subjugated to the iron-fisted rule of money might offer possible re-imaginings? How is it possible for higher education, in Marx’s term, to facilitate the negation of our negation?

Part 1: higher education and the totalising logic of capital

We might start by asking whether autonomous consumption and production of our common educational wealth is possible. Or whether our higher education is now inextricably bound to the individualistic, libertarian, debt-driven privatisation and separation of the market? Moreover, in this historical space, what is the future for higher education where it now exists as a functionary, or training ground, for further capitalist accumulation? No longer recognised as a public good in its own right, our dominant, anti-humanist rhetoric accepts the neoliberal, anti-historical consensus of Fukayama, and forgets the situated critiques of Keynesians like Galbraith. In this, critical theory is relegated to the margins, having no historical power in the present moment, and seeming to be beneath progress. In this present moment, the liberal view of business-as-usual, which imagines the humanising of capital through, for example, effective tax mechanisms or parliamentary democracy refuses us space to contemplate the historical moment and contingency of a higher education for neoliberalism. In the world of cuts versus taxation there is no historical critique.

Yet the world of higher education is one in which the mantra of growth and competition is explicit in HEFCE’s mission statement and in its reports, in the HEA’s strategic plan, and in the Coalition Government’s shackling of the AHRC’s research strategy to its big society agenda. Thus, strategy and structural agendas are linked to economic narratives, over-and-above social relationships. Moreover, in the depositions of representational groups like UUK, or University Alliance, or the British Academy, the rule of money and the interests of business are hegemonic and uncontestable. There is no critique of the relationship between higher learning and economic narratives or the financialisation of education. There is no central critique of the drive-to-indenture-through-debt or the managerialism of labour in the academy. There is no critique of the mantras of value-for-money, efficiency and more-for-less. There is no acceptable, historically-situated counter-narrative within the academy. There is just the world we are in. There is just outrage and money. There is just abstraction.

One implication of this is that higher education is no longer immune from the totalising nature of capitalism. As with the whole social environment, including our mores, cultures, politics, and personal relations, higher education is now part of the social factory. In this way, higher education is part of a regime of capitalist power that can direct the consumption and production of our lives, as we labour and as we relax. As Ellen Meiksins-Wood argued: “we’re living in a moment when, for the first time, capitalism has become a truly universal system…. Capitalism is universal also in the sense that its logic – the logic of accumulation, commodification, profit-maximisation, competition – has penetrated almost every aspect of human life and nature itself”. With no new geographical spaces ripe for accumulation by dispossession, the argument here is that the real subsumption of life to capital through debt and consumption is a form of accumulation by dispossession [of our futures], in order to enable profit maximisation. There is no ‘outside’ the logic of capital. There is no humanising its dominant logic by an appeal against cuts and for taxation. This is where the transnationality of financial capital works against those who would reform the financial apparatus of the state through a plea to the state. As the Libera Università Metropolitana notes

the financial capitalism and transnational corporations do not accept any form of regulation and consider the crisis to be a structural condition to be viewed as part of the contemporary production of value. On the other hand, the parabola of Obama indicates that reformism has come to halt and neo-Keynesian receipts are blunt weapon[s].

Part 2: the pedagogies of shock – the kettle and debt

Thus, the totalising, anti-humanist subsumption of higher education to the market is a form of shock therapy, imparted by the state in the name of growth and progress. Two elements of this shock therapy are especially important in the current historical moment, and these are the twin pedagogies of debt and the kettle. The idea is to marginalise dissent and resistance and to enforce the separation of our social concerns into private, personal spaces, so that we are not willing to fight for our common, educational wealth. We see *our* higher education as *our* private property, paid for and owned individually. The discipline of personal debt shackles dissent as we do not wish to be marginalised in the employment market as labour that is surplus to requirements. We are caught by the promise of the knowledge economy and forced to immerse ourselves in the skills of material and immaterial consumption, in order simply to survive. In order simply to consume.

It is in this space that debt becomes a pedagogy, focused upon the consumption of knowledge and lifestyles, of uncriticality, of employability and skills, of business and not economics, of STEM and not humanities. As Williams notes:

student debt, in its prevalence and amounts, constitutes a pedagogy, unlike the humanistic lesson that the university traditionally proclaims, of privatization and the market.

We are being taught a lesson that as the state transfers the social value of a university life to the individual via debt, higher education is no longer immune from the logic of the market, and is no longer able simple to call upon the mantra of the public good. Thus we enter a world where graduates face paying back double their student loans as debt charges rack up, and where Universities are disciplined by funding shortages into providing what their students as customers, disciplined by debt in a specific market, demand of them. There is no space for common deliberation about the purpose of an education in a world that faces massive socio-environmental disruption. There is only space for discussion of employment and debt repayment. The logic of capitalist accumulation through debt, and the treadmill necessity of finding spaces for the re-capitalisation/investment of surplus value shackles higher education to the hegemony of consumption for capitalist growth. Thus, even where it is shown that subsidies like EMA are efficient in recouping their costs they are scrapped because they are beyond the logic of debt. For, as Michael Gove argues: debt is now a way of life, and a way of marketising humanity: “Anyone put off… university by fear of… debt doesn’t deserve to be at university in the first place”.

This dominant narrative of debt and dispossession has been quickened within UK higher education through the Browne Report and the Coalition Government’s subsequent response. The global economic crisis has been turned into a means to speed the privatisation of the state, and to attempt the strangulation of possibilities to energise transformative, co-operative relations. This places HE in the vanguard of the Shock Doctrine, designed “to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy”. It rests upon, for example:

the relentless law of competition and coercion (internationalisation)
the impact of crisis to justify a tightening and a quickening of the dominant ideology of student-as-consumer, and HE-as-commodity
the transfer of state/public assets to the private sector under the belief that this will produce efficiency and economic outputs
the lock-down of state subsidies for ‘inefficient’ work (Bands C and D funded subjects)
the privatisation of state enterprises in the name of consumer choice, economic efficiency or sustainability = encouraging privatisation of HE
a refusal to run deficits, catalysing pejorative cuts to state services
extending the financialisation of capital and the growth of consumer debt, through increased fees
a controlled, economically-driven, anti-humanist ideology.

The Coalition’s higher education agenda might be read as an attempt to enforce the shock doctrine as part of a response to economic crisis. It might be read as an attempt to increase the market for western neoliberal values, delivered through the engine of higher education. This is revealed in David Willetts’ speech to the spring conference of Universities UK, in which he made plain a view of: privatisation; cost reduction; consumption as pedagogy; closing-off teaching in “undesirable” subjects; and anti-humanism.

Let me start this morning with our broader vision for HE – it is a simpler, more flexible system which gives students better value and greater choice. That means a more diverse range of providers should be able to play a role. It means funding for teaching should follow the choices that students make. And it means empowering students to make their own choices based on better, more transparent information.

In the face of this one wonders about the strength of an agenda focused upon taxation versus cuts, of clamping down on tax evasion and avoidance, rather than developing a critique of the historical space that we inhabit. As Žižek notes, our liberal aim is “to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on.” We believe that we can convince those in power, who support protest and resistance in the Middle East where issues of governmental legitimacy and resource appropriation are concerned, but for whom the kettle is the appropriate response to similar outbursts at home, that there is a more humanist, socially inclusive response. We believe that our alternative is no-growth, or de-growth [impossible in capital] or a green new deal [impossible in capital fuelled by liquid energy], or a return to Keynsian economics, in the face of the dominant logic of coercive competition that has subsumed the fabric of our lives. Žižek forces us to confront whether, in the face of a political system in which parties trade their strategies for immiserating cuts as if they are the only demonstration of a fitness for government, it is enough that “the institutional set-up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned”?

In this space, alternatives revealed as protests or occupations of university buildings, are revisited by the state in the form of the kettle. The language of the kettle becomes the language of state security against those who would protest the logic of imposed order. Thus University senior management describe student occupiers as terrorists intent on violent subversion of accepted norms, and as a threat to the education [training] of others. Elsewhere management threatens to bankrupt student protesters to silence dissent, or it calls in the police to remove forcibly those engaged in civil disobedience [and not criminal damage]. In this world protest is brutalised or it is de-legitimised. As Neocleous states:

the logic of ‘security’ is the logic of an anti-politics in which the state uses ‘security’ to marginalize all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, the debates and discussions that animate political life, suppressing all before it and dominating political discourse in an entirely reactionary way

Alternative forms of our common educational wealth are brutalised, marginalised and de-legitimised as threats to our security. In this space we forget the lessons of our histories of civil disobedience to authority, in reform movements, in the fight for the suffrage, in civil rights, in moves against war and brutality. Our anti-history subverts our quest for deliberation and meaningful alternatives. Our anti-history reduces us to the present and a story of growth and progress. Our anti-history reinforces the pedagogy of the kettle that enforces silence and stands asymmetrically opposed to critique and resistance. Our anti-historical stance allows the pedagogy of the kettle to be a means by which order can be imposed and a pedagogy of debt enforced. In this higher education risks complicity through silence.

Part 3: a brief note on global higher education

The realisation of a pedagogy of debt is a need to work and to undertake both material and immaterial labour. However, this work demands energy, and in turn stands against nature: climate change, peak oil, energy costs, the loss of biodiversity each threaten business-as-usual within capitalist social relations. Yet these outcomes are simply the collateral damage of accumulation and the desire to extract surplus value. Thus, higher education’s marketisation through internationalisation threatens to take more people from countries with low ecological footprints and export them to those with high footprints, or to transfer activities in the opposite direction. Higher education’s mission appears to be the generation of western business opportunities in the developing world, cloaked by issues of sustainability and global citizenship.

And it is simply not good enough to claim that technological efficiencies or a green new deal will save the day, because a rise in global population and affluence will ensure that this is not possible. Capitalism’s motive means of production is oil. Green technologies do not offer motive alternatives, and rely on natural resources that are hardly abundant. Deeper solutions are needed about the ways in which we address scarcity and abundance, and work for social as opposed to economic progress/growth. Yet in the anti-humanist logic of shock, there is no space to deliberate possible alternatives. Our pedagogies are remodelled to the market and the rule of money, through the kettle and debt, and away from an engagement with critical externalities like the need for a resilient education. In the face of the commodification and trading of food and water, which starves communities around the globe, of resource depletion and carbon emissions, which threaten our very existence, and of peak oil, which threatens neoliberalism as a whole, arguing over taxation versus cuts may be irrelevant. In spite of the fact that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, our historical moment demands a redefinition of what the University is for.

Part 4: critical alternatives and the idea of higher education

Mike Neary has argued that the struggle is not over what the university is for, but against what the university has become. In this struggle there are two forms congealing that offer critical alternatives, and which are connected into broader sites of resistance to the alienating logic of capitalism. The first is the raft of student occupations in the heart of the academy and the second is the emergence of autonomous, informal spaces for higher learning. These forms of resistance offer the possibility of transformation, in-part by re-imagining the general intellect through co-operative moments of protest, which develop aspects of what Hardt and Negri call the multitude, and our struggles for post-national democratic spaces and against submission to the bottom-line logic of capital. The role of the multitude, the force behind and in opposition to capital-as-empire, is in producing, consuming, co-operating and communicating capital through globalisation. Within the totality of the global, social factory, where transnational, corporate power dominates, there are countless spaces in which opposition can erupt: the environment; identity politics; education; health etc.. The immateriality of this multitude, which operates physically and virtually, and its swarming, autonomous, material nature, offers spaces for resistance, like hacking either software or corporate spaces, or for developing practical alternatives that might stick or which might dissolve as they become part of the spectacle, or for infusing wider, societal protests, like demonstrations against cuts, with critique.

The first form of struggle has been occupation. The conflicted and yet productive work of occupation across the UK demonstrates how students are attempting to re-define and re-produce their social roles, in light of a questioning of the structures higher education and their connection to higher learning. They ask:

Can we re-imagine a more transformative university space, which values making, knowing and being over simply consuming?
For whom is the university? For businesses and managers, for co-operators, or for society at large?
How can the space and the meaning of the university be liberated?

Within the occupation, the use of place, its attempted liberation from a normalised utility and its position as a sanctuary are revealed. The focus on spaces-of-sanctuary from hegemony, in order to deliberate transformational opportunities, has been shown in the levels of solidarity from across the globe within and between student movements, and which are increasingly being revealed as conflicted efforts at non-hierarchical, co-operative organisation. Thus, the University for Strategic Optimism argues for ‘A university based on the principle of free and open education, a return of politics to the public, and the politicisation of public space’. This reclamation, whilst negating claims of ownership or property rights, highlights the drive towards personal and co-operative autonomy in a living and commonly-owned space. The students who are arguing for transformation are engaging with what Marx called ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’. This highlights an anti-institutionalised, anti-controlling description of the social forms of higher learning, where barriers, separation, differences and transitions are critiqued dialectically and historicised within the dynamics of capital. In this, the social, co-operative structures rendered possible within universities as sites of potential knowing are pivotal in re-producing a shared set of educational and societal alternatives.

In this project, a second site of alternative, critical practices is revealed through autonomist, conceptual spaces that offer open source possibilities for transformation.

Student-as-producer is a concept which ‘extends the concept of production to include ways in which students, as social individuals, affect and change society, so as to be able to recognise themselves in the social world of their own design.’
The Really Open University’s emphasis on the need for praxis, in re-asserting the idea of the university as a site for critical action, resistance and opposition, led by students.
The Peer to Peer University’s open approach to co-operative production through sharing and accreditation.
The Institute of Collapsonomics’ analysis of meaningful socio-cultural resilience, and our capacity to develop agile and mobile associations, which can solve problems and develop alternatives.
The University of Utopia’s aim to invent a form of radicality that confronts the paradox of the possibility of abundance (freedom) in a society of scarcity (non-freedom).
The Really Free School’s aim to de-school society, in order to share the possibility for re-producing something more meaningful along with those around you. Against the rule of money, the Really Free School encourages “a collective learning process directed by your own desires, ideas, questions and problems. We hope that here knowledge and skills will not simply be transmitted – but created.”

These activist possibilities highlight the interconnections between organisation and technology, environmental demands and human needs, congealed in specific places like occupations in the academy. In challenging the hegemony of neoliberalism these spaces are theorising a higher education that is not framed by business continuity (i.e. ensuring ‘business-as-usual’). From these places emerges a demand for a practical, critical theory, embedded within society that engages with wider environmental changes, against the alienation of capitalist work, and the reductionism of a debate of taxation versus cuts. These co-operators are debating and fighting for the idea and the form of the University-in-society and not the University-for-economy. They are attempting to do so in transitional spaces infused with and by a culture of open critique. These spaces and conflicted, not always consensual, and they are compromised. However, they are at least deliberating alternatives.

As Paul Mason noted last month, about why it is kicking off everywhere, “At the heart of it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future”. The newly-politicised energy of these graduates instantiates protest, just as the 26 March demonstrations in London demonstrated the new vitality of a broad demographic, represented in large part by the associational democracy of trades unions. This broad demographic is against hegemonic, unrepresentative, parliamentary politics. The question now is how autonomous movements and a broader demographic, congealed in an immediate agenda against governmental cuts, might be enabled to imagine societal alternatives in a world that faces massive disruption. How will governance work at local, national, global scales? As students and staff work together in occupation and in sites of resistance, we might ask how their re-imagining of the role of higher education can be dissolved into the fabric of society, so that higher learning can enable alternatives to become realities against the rule of money.

As Mieksins-Wood noted fifteen years ago:

the universalization of capitalism not just as a measure of success but as a source of weakness… It can only universalize its contradictions, its polarizations between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. Its successes are also its failures… Now capitalism has no more escape routes, no more safety valves or corrective mechanisms outside its own internal logic… the more it maximizes profit and so-called growth – the more it devours its own human and natural substance.

I have no solutions. The Vice-Chancellors who have been debating these issues have no solutions. Only the willingness to ask and discuss questions, and to find spaces to test alternatives in co-operation. So we might ask:

Are there other ways of producing knowing? What authority does HE/do universities have?
In a knowing world, rather than a knowledge economy, what does the curriculum mean?
Does a pedagogy of production need to start with the principle that we need to consume less of everything? What does this mean for ownership of the institution at scale [local, regional, global]?
How can student voices help in the struggle to re-invent the world?
What is to be done?

Debate: are Universities a public good?

December 7, 2011
Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 4 February 2011

Halfway through Wednesday’s DMU debate on whether Universities are a public good, a friend asked me if this was the right question. Doesn’t the answer have to be “yes”? Whether you are a neoliberal fixated on the privatisation of public assets, and driving forward market fundamentalism in the name of the knowledge economy, or a *liberal* for whom the University is about developing global knowing and inclusion, or a radical for whom the University is a space for re-imagining in the face of global disruptions, the answer has to be yes. The University is a space in which the focus can be on the economy, or on mending/remaking our social relationships, or on socio-technical solutions to crises of global political economy.

So is the question are Universities a public good meaningful? It depends on how that question and any solutions are to be developed. That question has to open up a crack in the dominant logic of our political economy, within which the University, as organisation as well as idea, sits. One of the issues I had with Wednesday’s debate was that it assumes, as Žižek argues, that our liberal aim is “to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on.” Žižek queries whether it is enough that “the institutional set-up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned.” Framed by this critique of the failure of liberal democracy to humanise, and in the face of the State’s oppression and antagonism, Mike Neary notes that we must question whether in education “The struggle is not for the University, but against what the University has become.”

This is where the debate risks becoming mired in the honest desire to remove us from the immiseration and alienation of capitalist work, towards the idea that we can have growth and pensions and fridges and shiny new iPads in a world that faces significant disruption revealed by energy and resource availability, climate change and massive, structural debt. The point was made that growth is a problem on a planet with fixed resources. But the dominant logic of capital is framed by growth. De-growth or no-growth is illogical in the face of debt, the market and an ageing population that needs social support through taxation. It is not possible to expand markets and grow, and cut carbon emissions – GDP and carbon are coupled. So we need a radical rethink. Unless we wish to give up, and finally accept that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism.

The University’s place in this space is framed by the iron cage of control exerted by capital’s control of public funding for growth, and nothing else. The Coalition’s demand for higher education to commit to its economic agenda leaves little space for alternatives to emerge within a funding structure that demands all activity be shackled to growth or else, where our students and young people are brutalised in the kettle when they demonstrate opposition, and where the hegemonic, neoliberal discourse is challenged in a fractured way. So we focus on saving education, or saving disability living allowance, or saving day centres, or saving our national forests. We do not join this up into a set of (radical) alternatives for what our society might become. We abdicate all responsibility to the state that alienates us in the form of funding controls or a mantra of efficiency or through police batons.

And yet the University is a space in a set of communities that might offer the hope that we can create something different, in the face of climate change and peak oil and debt. It offers us a space to re-think our world beyond the subject discipline or single issue or single community. These arbitrary differences allow those in power to divide and rule, and thereby to stop meta-narratives or explanations of the reasons why we are in this crisis from emerging. So we need to ruthlessly critique the rationale behind the Coalition’s agenda, not just in education but across our communities, and with our communities. We need to move on from the outcomes of the debates around “Are Universities a public good?” to ask “what is the University for?”, in order to debate “how might the University be re-imagined in order to provide alternatives?”

Already there are spaces emerging where students and staff are re-imagining education, either in *organisations*:
http://universityforstrategicoptimism.wordpress.com/about/
http://reallyopenuniversity.wordpress.com/what-is-the-rou/
http://www.universityofutopia.org/about
http://collapsonomics.org/

or within *associations*:
http://educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com/about/
http://publicuniversity.org.uk/about/
http://purposed.org.uk/about/

These spaces engage a wide-range of activists in engaging with the question of are universities a public good, to assess the ways in which Universities are public goods and what are those goods for, in order to ask what is to be done? That is the end-point. We need to critique the place of the University in a world that faces significant disruption, to try to work out alternatives that support our communities. For DMU that is important in enabling our communities, at each scale (local, regional, national, international) to adapt to dislocations. Involving those communities in re-imaging the university, in re-inventing it, demands that we open up our places and ideas, that we engage people in the production of their lives or their life-world. In this way the university becomes resilient in adapting to change. In this way the university becomes a space for transformation.

OER, capital and critical social theory

December 7, 2011
Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 30 January 2011

In his post on Openness, Socialism, and Capitalism, David Wiley argues for the reform of a particular form of capitalism within education that should enable taxpayers to recover the value of OER-as-commodity, in the same way that they would receive the value of any other commodity in a functioning market. Wiley argues that “The symmetry of the transaction is part of the fundamental social contract that allows markets to function.” Joss Winn has already argued that Wiley has misunderstood the historically-situated significance of capitalism and OER, and has demonstrated the complex nature of the (OER-as-)commodity form through which capital can extract relative surplus value from labour and, within the context of capitalist work, how the production of OERs is a way in which capital uses technology to discipline labour.

There are two ways in which this analysis of OERs might be developed further. The first is in the need to situate OERs within the totality of critical social theory as applied to education, rather than simply treating them as fetishised commodities or shareable goods. The second relates to how their development connects to an increasingly neoliberal higher education that is being exported from the West to “developing” nations, as part of a social contract enforced upon them, through for instance the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programme, and which is a form of primitive accumulation.

Wiley argues that within a perfectly-functioning capitalism our purchasing habits “are all governed by our common understanding of this commonsense behavior society expects of us”, namely that we get a commodity to the value of what we pay for it. However, Winn has demonstrated that the market doesn’t operate in this way, and that the effects of coercive competition are to make more complex the effects of costs, relative surplus value and profit throughout the supply chain, so that the commodity purchased realises more than just its price. The alleged social contract in this space is not neutral or of a fixed composition. It is eternally shifting depending upon the dictates of private property (who owns the means of production or the commodity), and the way in which value is realised/optimised. Moreover, the commodity also reveals the social relations of capitalist work that underpin this contract. The current clamour over petrol price rises in the UK highlights this, where we see competing interests, a fluctuating cost and price based on a variety of supply- and demand-side inputs, government intervention and geo-politics all intervening between the consumer and the commodity.

Into this, we cannot abstractly throw a concept like openness and hope that it can/will humanise capital. The domination of space and time by capital and the social relations that are revealed by it, demonstrate that openness is an illusion. Openness in the production, sharing and reuse of commodities, in the face of coercive competition that forms a treadmill for the production of value, needs to be analysed in relation to power. Who controls the means of production has the power to frame how open are the relations for the production or consumption of goods or services, in order to realise value. Capital needs to valorise and reproduce itself. The totality of this need, rather than the rights of taxpayers, shapes how human values like openness are revealed and enabled.

Therefore, central to this view of the value of OER, or for that matter openness – either to consumers or taxpayers – is to place it within the totality of capitalist work. Lukács identified the value of critical social theory in providing a totality of historically-situated social reproduction that was all-pervasive. In Volume I of Capital, Marx noted

Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.

Within this totality, the parts of the system acquire properties that have meaning, in relation to their connections that are uncovered through dialectical analysis. Without such a dialectical analysis all we are left with is a desperate hope that we can make the elements of capitalist work that we deem to be dysfunctional work more humanely or correctly or perfectly. Yet as as Žižek argues, our liberal aim “to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on” is doomed to fail. The socialism to which Wiley loosely points would be one such attempt to rework market capitalism in the favour of labour or the taxpayer. A more radical view is that OERs can never be a representation of, or a catalyst for, a means of humanising capitalist education. The more radical view is that, in deconstructing one element of education, like the OER, we require a critique of its place in the whole edifice of capitalist education as a functionary of the system of capitalist work. From there we can position the development of radical alternatives, like who owns the value of the outputs of our labour-power.

In this view, OERs can be implicated in a broader totality or production, consumption and re-production of social relations, which is historically situated with capitalism. Winn notes the importance of this when he notes that “capitalism is not isolated to private trade or the markets but impacts all aspects of a capitalist society. It is a social totality subservient to the production of value.” This totality is in constant flux and motion, and reveals what Marx termed ‘the annihilation of space by time’. This control over technology, in order to speed the production of relative surplus value and the circulation of commodities, is one means by which the reproduction of capitalist work can be assured.

A critique of the place of OER within capitalist work is critical to engaging with the idea of the University and higher education in the face of neoliberalism. The dominant position here is currently ‘sustainability’, which is a cipher for extending relative surplus value. In the face of this, Winn states that “When we talk about the sustainability of OERs or business cases for the production of OERs, we’re talking about how to measure the value of this endeavour and usually this is through attracting external grants and raising the profile of the institution in some way”. For Wiley the matter seems to focus more upon “the basic principles of capitalism”, where payment for a service like education [e.g. taxation] is an entitlement to receipt of any and all outcomes possible from that payment, rather than that payment [taxation] forming part of a deeper social, and not personal, engagement. Thus the production of OERs through taxation demands “that these products either be placed in the public domain or licensed with an open license”.

However, what is currently being revealed, either in the US through the new federal education fund that is making available $2 billion to create OER resources in community colleges, or in the UK through the HEFCE Online Learning taskforce report, Seizing the Opportunity of online learning for UK higher education, is a focus upon accelerating the precepts that underpin growth or business-as-usual, with the attendant neoliberal threats that I outlined in my post on internationalisation and the shock doctrine. In particular, these focus upon the promotion of western higher education as a vehicle for market fundamentalism, cloaked in terminology like “value-for-money”, “efficiency and scale”, and “international demand and competition.” Given the scale of the global disruptions that we collectively face, this narrow focus on economic growth, driven by an agenda of debt reduction, privatisation, contract working, consumption and financialisation [or those structural adjustment programmes], seems illogical. However, it does seem easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The current approach demonstrates a homogenised and Western-capitalist view of higher education, where OERs in Africa produces western case studies in English, where open case studies from Nestle are used as an exemplar of a single unifying corporate culture for development, or where McKinsey claim that there are elements of excellence in taxpayer-funded education that are generic and profitable. This space is framed by the necessity of economic growth. Where Prime Minister Cameron states that there is no alternative to the global free market liberalisation of trade, and where Western neoliberalism holds sway over those practices, what price openness in education funded by taxpayers? What price co-operation where coercive competition is demanded by those who require 3% growth? Higher education is framed by these dominant concerns.

Werner Bonefeld has recently written about the cuts agenda in the UK. He has argued that “It is a struggle against the reduction of life time to labour time. The fight against cuts is in fact a fight for a life.” This is the true nature of the struggle for the University and the place of our productive capability in that struggle. It is not the struggle to receive what we think we deserve in a market that alienates and impoverishes and immiserates on a global scale. It is not the struggle to assess how as consumers we recover the value we think we deserve from a commodity. It is the struggle to recover our power-to create our world that is at issue. In this we need to recognise how we critique what is done to us, and the totality of the spaces in which we produce and consume. This is about understanding how our wage labour and our labour-power sits in opposition to the power of capital. It is about how we have the power of emancipation in our ability to produce rather than simply to consume. That emancipation will never be revealed in our role as taxpayers. This is about control of the means of production and the spaces of consumption, shared in common, in the face of financial disorder and austerity, and capital’s quickening of the pace of privatisation. In fighting this, I am interested less in the value of what I consume as an individual through a social contract (that is in-turn the outcome of my ordered and governed life-as-labour), and more interested in my association with others in the creation of my life-world. In this we are reminded by Marx that it is:

only in association with others has each individual the means of cultivating his talents in all directions. Only in a community therefore is personal freedom possible… In a genuine community individuals gain their freedom in and through their association.

Internationalisation, student voices and the shock doctrine: disrupting business-as-usual

December 7, 2011
Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 24 January 2011

This post complements my keynote at the 11^th Teesside University Learning and Teaching Conference, held on Wednesday 26^th January. There are two slideshows. The first, entitled “in solidarity”, is a rolling piece to be run without commentary at the start of the session. It presents some images of student activism across the globe, limited to the period since 1968. It intersperses these with comments from the current UK coalition government and some detail on the financialisation and privatisation of UK higher education, in order partially to describe hegemony.

This slideshow highlights that student activism against the state has been, and continues to be, met with state-sanctioned violence. In the accelerated implementation of neoliberalism within the UK, opposition is branded as outlaw or is brutalised in the kettle. As societies are disrupted by climate change, debt, food production and energy availability, there is a quickening of the transformation of the state towards an iron cage of control, in the name of business-as-usual, growth and capital. And all this is a world where, as Žižek argues, our liberal aim is “to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on.” Žižek queries whether it is enough that “the institutional set-up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned.” Framed by this critique of the failure of liberal democracy to humanise, and in the face of the State’s oppression and antagonism, Mike Neary notes that we must question whether in education “The struggle is not for the University, but against what the University has become.”

In the face of disruption, and framed by an agenda that promotes internationalisation as a space into which UK HE can grow, steps the student.

The second slideshow is entitled “Internationalisation, student voices and the shock doctrine: disrupting business-as-usual”. I wish to ask two questions, from which spring a further set of questions, in this talk.

What is the relationship between UK higher education, internationalisation agendas and student voices in a world that faces significant disruption?
Is business-as-usual a viable option?

Business-as-usual

In slide 4 I highlight UUK’s response to the UK Coalition Government’s spending review proposals. It develops an argument about UK HE that demonstrates how the sector is important and an engine for economic growth. It begins to sketch a view that UK HE’s size and complexity, its networked potential to support growth, its ability to act as a motive-force, gears it to be re-focused and shackled in the name of market fundamentalism. Here, HE is about resources and the valorisation of (human) capital-in-motion, rather than the relationships between people. This is a hegemonic view of business-as-usual, further exemplified in HEFCE’s mission and the HEA’s Strategic Plan [slides 5-6]. In these documents, Internationalisation is explicitly and uncritically placed in relation to economic growth.

In slides 7-9 I highlight recent reports that demonstrate the place of UK HE in a model of neoliberal political economy, focused upon human capital in the global knowledge economy and the accumulation of capital by the UK through exports, alongside the increasing global mobility/flow/circulation of students as part of this process of coercive competition. A snapshot of current practice highlights a flow from developing nations [BRICS and south-east Asia] towards the West. Slides 10-13 highlight the current role of these nations in providing “human” capital in the form of students, counterpoised against their emerging success in Western-oriented school testing and the emergence of China as a space for the inward flow of mobile students. Importantly this is as opposed to the relative reduction of students into the USA. Is there a clash coming, or a shift in the locus of power between the USA and China in HE, as a function of the movement and re-production of transnational capital? This view is framed by slide 14, which also points out that whilst there may be differences based on the type of (non-) accredited, international activity, it is important that student migration grows faster than overall migration. At issue here is the cultivation of those likely to produce proprietary knowledge, as opposed to knowledge workers. A tied question is who will own such proprietary knowledge (workers)?

In slides 15-16 I wish to raise some central questions around business-as-usual;

Is it possible to develop an internationalisation of HE that enables alien experiences enrich the curriculum and global “knowing”? (Deliberately opposed to “the knowledge economy”.) This is important in finding shared solutions to global problems.
Is engagement with overseas students’ by UK HE a form of capitalist primitive accumulation, of both fiscal and human capital? Or is it tied to the transnational movement of global capital linked to corporate development?
Where students entering UK HE are privileged and gain further ‘positional advantage’ in a crowded and increasingly ‘credentialised’ graduate labour market, is UK HE contributing to elitist, hegemonic positions in countries of origin? Moreover, are these positions an extension and a valorisation of neoliberal socio-cultural forms?

HE as homogenised

In slide 17 I begin to argue for a homogenised higher education, irrespective of cultural specificity/difference, with a focus on employment rather than knowing or a transformation of thinking. This view is focused institutionally in slides 18-19 by demonstrating that the international student experience is shaped [with a few exceptions based on state/financial security, like border controls] like the “normal” student experience. Such normalisation is helpful in extending a hegemonic position through the incorporation and assimilation of the “other”.

It is interesting to note that once the curriculum is brought into play, we begin to see examples of how internationalisation might enable experiential, or practical, production to occur, in the name of a transformation of mind [slides 20-21]. However, this transformative moment is almost lost in the face of the homogenised, institutional representations of internationalisation/student living that are revealed by university web-sites, whether they are grouped by 1994, Million+, Russell Group or University Alliance [slides 22-25]. This is in spite of the focus in some of these spaces for materials which underpin the development of staff, or the appearance of some student voices.

A view of HE as a convergent place for production/consumption is also revealed in the face of the stereotyped view of Asians as rote-learners, as opposed to more sophisticated, contextually-driven learners. Although, of course, we also see the same claims made about some home-based students who come to HE following their A-levels. This view that there is good [Western] educational practice that might be transferred is also reinforced by those private consultancies who are trying to engage with the rush to outsource practices, spaces and “excellence” [slide 26]. In spite of this structural, institutional position, at the level of the curriculum we see the possibility for a transformation of mind through shared, generic human experiences/stories that spill through. These need to be positioned culturally but they open up spaces for the transfer of things and thoughts [slides 27-29].

And so in slide 30 I wish to ask whether the internationalisation of HE has the possibility to be about something more radical – that it might be more humane? That it’s not just the (knowledge) economy (and efficiency) that is to be served, but that, irrespective of cultural differences, we might be able to produce something else. There is something here on power and the production of the curriculum and the world at a range of scales. Moreover, maybe commonalities are more important in a world that faces significant disruption.

However, we need to reveal how that view relates to our work with students. Work on the student voice is often seen as inclusive and democratic, and to validate specific views. It humanises our view of them because up to a point they are included in our work [slides 31-32]. At issue is whether our conversations with students offers the possibility of a radical moment in which we might crack open higher education for a productive purpose beyond neoliberal intent.

Slides 33-44 demonstrate how much work needs to be done here in engaging students with each other in the face of overtly economically-driven imperatives. These quotes from students highlight the alienating impact of money and debt on social relations, and how the cultural separation of individuals and groups is enhanced through our current focus on HE as economic engine, fuelled by debt and privatisation. This separation and alienation encourages marginalisation and views of the other. It enables the aggressive marketing of a specific way of life that is driven by capitalist work.

Disruption

The next section focuses upon HE’s place in a world that faces significant disruption. These disruptions are prefigured around four themes.

Control and management of flows of ‘economic migrants’/asylum-seekers: here is a view of international students as threat, as the other, unless they are holders of proprietary knowledge who become like us. This enables the dominant neoliberal position to elide the threat of domination by alien cultures with attacks on the wastefulness of the public sector and its assets, and to aggressively argue for privatisation [slides 46-50].
Globalising privilege: as mobile students represent, to some extent, a ‘privileged’ selection of humans, there is a risk that ‘student switchers’ enable developed countries to accumulate human capital, and extend its hegemonic position through the ownership of proprietary knowledge workers [commonly referred to as a brain/skills drain] [slide 51].
HE and post-colonialism/neoliberalism: whilst there is a flow of networks and connections between nodes in the West, and to an extent between the East and the West, there is emerging power within those on the boundaries that is challenging and radically threatening to established norms. The economic rise of the BRICS offers a central geographical space into which this clash may be escalated [slides 52-54].
Against nature: climate change, peak oil, energy costs, the loss of biodiversity each threaten business-as-usual within capitalist social relations. Internationalisation threatens to take more people from countries with low ecological footprints and export them to those with high footprints, or to transfer activities in the opposite direction. And it is simply not good enough to claim that technological efficiencies will save the day, because a rise in global population and affluence will ensure that this is not possible. Deeper solutions are needed [slides 54-60].

As a result we might need to work in a more focused way at a range of scales, including within HE. We might need to revisit radically our curriculum and activities. We might need to think about limits. We might need to fight views of business-as-usual predicated upon students-in-debt as consumers-of-education. We might need to stand against technological and economic determinism and provide radical alternatives. And when we are told that capital in all its forms [financial, human, social, cultural] will save us because we will be more intelligent/flexible/adaptable, we need to ruthlessly critique the alienation, the imposition of hegemony, and the immiseration of life and labour enforced by capital in its self-valorisation and in its re-production of those social relations that imprison [slide 61].

The Shock Doctrine and HE: the place of internationalisation

Within UK HE, the Browne Report and the Coalition Government’s subsequent response has turned the global economic crisis into a means to quicken the privatisation of the state, and to attempt the strangulation of possibilities to energise transformative, co-operative relations. This places HE in the vanguard of the Shock Doctrine, designed “to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy”. It rests upon, for example…

The relentless law of competition and coercion [the rush to internationalise].
The impact of crisis to justify a tightening and a quickening of the dominant ideology [student-as-consumer; HE-as-commodity].
The transfer of state/public assets to the private sector under the belief that it will produce a more efficient [smaller, less regulatory] government and improve economic outputs.
Lock-down of state subsidies for “inefficient” work [Band C and D funded subjects].
The privatisation of state enterprises in the name of consumer choice, economic efficiency or sustainability [encouraging the privatisation of HE].
A refusal to run deficits [pejorative cuts to state services].
Extending the financialisation of capital and the growth of consumer debt [increased fees].
Controlled, economically-driven, anti-humanist ideology.

And so, internationalisation might be read as an attempt to enforce the shock doctrine as part of a response to economic crisis. It might be read as an attempt to increase the market for western neoliberal values, delivered in-part through higher education. At issue then is how shared, international values/stories might enable oppositional, alternative, meaningful social transformation to be realised.

In this, we might ask [slides 63-66]:

Is HE resilient in the face of disruption? Or is it disoriented in the face of shock?
Do our approaches to internationalisation and the place of students in HE limit re-invention?
How does the intimacy of commonality help us? Which co-operative projects might offer possibilities?
So what might this mean for student voices in HE? Can the voices of international students help HE become more resilient?

Students-as-producers of resilient HE?

Resilience is about communities and societies working to adapt to disruption. It is not about business-as-usual. It is not about mitigation. It is about engagement, education, empowerment and encouragement. It is about co-operation and not competition. And so the University might become a space for international engagement with the production of a radical, active, non-hegemonic set of experiences. The totality of our contextual experience might be analysed from a range of perspectives, in order to develop new identities and social relations [slides 67-69].

And so students and academics might, irrespective of culture, work as co-producers of a mass intellect in commons. Collaborative social relations might enable us to re-envisage the University as a revolutionary space, where knowledge is constructed not for consumption and privatization and commodification for the economy, but instead for global knowing and reimagining, and solutions to global disruptions that are not financialised. Within this approach, civil, experiential action is critical, as is critique. The emergence of activities underpinned by co-governance and co-production, focused upon praxis, are central to this approach, and in answering the question: “In the face of disruption what is HE for?” [slides 70-73].

By engaging with education as social re-production, and taking on-board the homogenous, shared elements of out life-world, we might ask:

Are there other ways of producing knowing? What authority does HE/do universities have? How relevant are fixed institutions/programmes in a disrupted world?
How do internationalised student voices help to adapt to disruption? In a knowing world, rather than a knowledge economy, what does curriculum innovation mean?
Does a pedagogy of production need to start with the principle that we need to consume less of everything? What does this mean for ownership of the institution at scale [local, regional, global]?

A focus on business-as-usual is no help in a world that faces significant disruption. We need to begin with our students and ask them “How can internationalised student voices help in the struggle to re-invent the world?” For it is through their revelation of the world that alternatives may be produced.

A revised note on technology, outsourcing and the privatisation of higher education

December 7, 2011
Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 14 December 2010

In a recent note on technology, outsourcing and the privatisation of higher education, I argued that hegemonic economic arguments, uncritically focused on short-term efficiency gains and the perceived flexibility of cloud-based provision, is accelerating the commodification of IT services, systems and data. A core strand of this is that the dominant logic “makes no attempt to focus upon an institution as a complex socio-cultural set of spaces, within which technology and those who work with it are situated.”

My belief that we are witnessing “an emerging crisis of the public space” revealed in-part through technological outsourcing, privatisation and enclosure has been amplified by recent, global socio-cultural events. These events highlight the power of capital in enclosing our places for co-operation.

In an excellent commentary on Amazon’s decision to abandon Wikileaks, John Naughton claims that the migration to the cloud offers problems for those who dissent from prevailing narratives of power. The political pressure brought to bear on Amazon, and its decision not to support a counter-hegemonic or alternative position, for reasons that are extra-judicial, is concerning for democratic engagement on-line. Naughton quotes Rebecca MacKinnon: “A substantial, if not critical amount of our political discourse has moved into the digital realm. This realm is largely made up of virtual spaces that are created, owned and operated by the private sector.” Therefore the control of spaces for deliberation, where controversy can be played out is compromised by the interplay between power and capital. It should be noted that the Wikileaks farrago has been critiqued as business-as-usual, in that “The leaking performed by Wikileaks does not imply the disclosure of the web of power that government puts into motion”. However, the attack on dissent matters in a world where autonomous student and academic activists are using the web to oppose the dominant logic of those in power, and where the state is physically opposing forms of protest.
MacKinnon goes on to state that “The future of freedom in the internet age may well depend on whether we the people can succeed in holding companies that now act as arbiters of the public discourse accountable to the public interest.” The web is entwined with our social forms – it provides a space to widen our engagement with education, with exchange and production, with communities in their struggle for justice. The web forms a space, embedded within our view of social forms, within which ideas of our shared public goods can be defended and extended. In the logic of capital, where cuts and privatisation, or the marketisation of our lives, are being catalysed at an increasing velocity, the spaces we defend and extend for shared social value are critical. However, it is clear that whilst the state has moved to enclose and brutalise physical space, through the use of militarised tactics like kettling people, in an attempt to reduce dissent via shock therapy, such coercion on-line also needs to be resisted in the name of democracy.
Resistance is difficult to achieve for it rests on a view of the commons or public goods, which in-turn stands against the dominant logic of all spaces opened up for the exchange of commodities. Dyer-Witheford has demonstrated how the tensions between exchange for sharing, versus co-operation for sharing are exacerbated in the violence of the virtual space. Dyer-Witheford sees some hope in the concept of the multitude raised by Negri and Hardt in opposition to the power of capital that re-produced systemically, beyond national borders, as Empire. The multitude offers hope because it re-connects opposition towards the alienating, dehumanising effects of capitalism and coercive competition, by way of a proliferation of autonomous spaces. It re-connects opposition into the ethics of peer-to-peer sharing and the hacker. It offers a metaphor for multiple ways to dissolve the toxicity of capitalism into a new set of deliberated social forms. In this we need to reconsider our approach to the personal and towards celebrating libertarian views of the individual that commodify our privacy, or at least the state’s control of it. This is why the place of hacktivism, in and against capital’s dominant social forms and their shackling of our labour and social lives to an economically-determined set of outcomes, is important. Hacktivism as “electronic direct action in which creative and critical thinking is fused with programming skill and code creating a new mechanism to achieve social and political change” is critical in “securing the Internet as a platform of free speech and expression.” Increasingly, this work will be needed as the state marketises or closes down our public spaces for free speech and expression, and forces public bodies like Universities to privatise and valorise their work, conditioned by debt.
In the face of an homogenised life, we can view the autonomous nature of student occupations of physical and virtual space as a protest without co-ordinates or co-ordination. The lack of leadership in the face of a militarised response has enabled the multitude of dissenting voices to work towards a network of dissent that is able to theorise and critique a position beyond fees and cuts to teaching budgets. The dominant logic is one of resistance to capital, visited symptomatically through fees, cuts to public services, financialisation of debt, and corporate tax avoidance. One possibility is that the use of cloud-based social media, which is at once open source and proprietary, peer-to-peer, shared and closed, offers ways for those in opposition to subscribe to a broader critical and social opposition in developing this critique. This is not the world of the lone reviewer or subscriber, who can rate/subscribe to other lone reviewers. This is the world of security in the social; it is the world of re-production and sharing as social exchanges and social activities that are not-for-profit. They need to be defended and not proscribed.

There is an emerging concern that the privatisation and outsourcing of spaces and opportunities by Universities, driven by cost and an agenda of debt, is a real risk to freedom-of-speech and dissent. Where private firms are able to control public discourse, and where the internet becomes tethered or enclosed, there are no guarantees that we will be able to challenge. There is no guarantee that we will not be kettled or coerced where we protest on-line. The privatisation of our academic spaces threatens a negation of the critical, social life. It needs to be deliberated before that possibility is destroyed.

A note on technology, outsourcing and the privatisation of higher education

December 7, 2011
Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 November 2010

Charles Arthur wrote in Saturday’s Guardian that the UK Government shouldn’t hang on Google’s every word. Arthur makes some interesting points around the increasing privatisation of public spaces and assets. [Although he does not explicitly make this connection, I am happy so to do.]

He notes issues of governance and evidence-for-policy, in the face of progressive use of technology [rather than technology-as-progress]: “sometimes there’s a temptation to think that because a big, successful company tells you something’s wrong, that it really must be”.
He notes issues of technology-as-progress that risks catalysing enclosure of the commons by our decision-makers, with PM David Cameron arguing that “we are reviewing our IP laws, to see if we can make them fit for the internet age”, and David Willetts, the Minister with responsibility for higher education adding “The US rule is that ‘anything man has invented under the sun you should be able to patent’. That’s something we do wish to investigate.”
He notes that there is limited critique of the role of technology in defining the state and its services: “But ministers and prime ministers are in thrall to those who would sell them technology.”

A key point that Arthur makes is about the productive value of opening-up, rather than closing down the web through overt institutional policy and governance. A central point here is that decision-makers are able to take action based on a view of technology as a function of systemic, socio-cultures, that are historic, rather than by seeing technology as a-historic and neutral. In referring to the opening-up of UK data under the last Labour Government and linking it to a view that open agendas spur innovation, Arthur argues that “There’s a lesson here: Berners-Lee spurned the idea of commercialising his invention of the web, in favour of giving it away; and everyone, including government, has benefited enormously.” The lessons of technology-in-education demand a political view rather than one which is driven by economics.

This gave me pause-for-thought, around what we give away, what we control, and what we open up, in terms of the recent Educause and NACUBO white paper on Shaping the Higher Education Cloud. The paper highlights how the Cloud offers hope for efficiencies and economies of scale, but that HE will need to overcome its “long tradition of building its own systems and tendency to self-operate almost everything related to IT”, as if culturally-specific norms, operations and strategies are inherently bad. The paper mentions the core mission and competencies of HE, hinting that these are not informed by technology [and neither do those norms inform the development of technology], and moreover that technology is socially, culturally and historically neutral, and can therefore be left to “experts”, or at least the managers who control the labour of those experts.

The argument given for efficiency in the face of mounting economic pressures, for flexibility in the cloud, for the commoditization of IT, makes no attempt at meaningful critique of what services, systems or data should be in the Cloud or why. It makes no attempt to focus upon an institution as a complex socio-cultural set of spaces, within which technology and those who work with it are situated. The paper highlights how privatisation of technology and infrastructures that support public assets like Universities are vital. Moreover, it highlights HE-as-consumption: as the consumption of content and data; and as the consumption of services. It says nothing of the lived experience of HE; it says nothing of the lived production of HE by those who work within it; it says nothing of the open engagement of those within HE with a range of stakeholders; it says nothing of the co-operative production of academic forms that are socio-cultural and which incorporate technology. In stating that by moving infrastructure, software and platforms-as-services to the cloud, universities can then concentrate on core competencies, the paper speaks of homogenisation, where the only choices on outsourcing are based on cost and risk, rather than academic practices and forms.

Whilst the paper says little about wider issues of enclosure of the open web, through Apps and the logic of private clouds, it does at least argue for federated access. However, identity management hosted by a broker for a set of private companies offers different perspectives from those negotiated and managed in the public domain, in co-operation. If my identity is in the cloud, and I am separated from my institutional ties through the dislocation of people and place, what does that do to my alienation from my work through myself? As I am further virtualised, and my identity commodified for the use of brokers or aggregators, what does that mean for the value of my labour and the control of my self or access to my self, whether by me alone or in conjunction with others? Separation rather than co-operation is at risk here, in the logic of outsourcing.

In this, as with so much analysis of technology-in-education, there is a chronic lack of critique. The paper argues for the “promise of cloud computing to transform higher education learning and business processes”, and yet offers no evidence for the former, or for systems that might be migrated [although the risk of payroll being managed in the Cloud gets a mention]. Does technology really transform learning? This is a classic positivist position, and one similar to traditional, historical arguments for the productive efficiencies of technology that underpin progress and ‘growth’. In this, other unsubstantiated statements are made for green facilities and the value of integration, whilst there is no meaningful focus on the impact of our outsourcing of carbon emissions or of our resource use. In spite of this, the key to the logic of outsourcing and the cloud is given on page 8: “the ability of cloud providers… to substitute capital for labour – makes it unlikely that higher education can compete on cost”. Here, the logic of technology within capitalism is laid bare, and it is reiterated on page 15, where the stepped-plan of what institutions should move to the cloud develops with no focus on culture and/or meaning, but simply on economic efficiency and ‘growth’. [Academic engagement is first mentioned on page 19.]

This demands a further reading of Postone’s Time, Labour and Social Domination. Where technology is divorced from academic endeavour and seen neutrally through a purely fiscal lens, it can be used to define the privatisation and marketisation of higher education, irrespective of that sector’s role as a key state asset. In this, the discourse of other technologically-driven innovations, like the personal learning environment needs critique against a prevailing libertarian standpoint, and in connection with co-operative and open, academic engagement. The fear is that an uncritical treatment of innovations that might be seen to be against the institution and against the public, and for the separation of private, individual consumption [including the PLE and OERs], work for neoliberal agendas of the marketisation of that which is ‘technologically-neutral’. Technology-in education has to be analysed in terms of critical, social theory, rather than simply economics.

This is an emerging crisis of the public space, which re-focuses our need to raise major questions of technology-in-education. Where are the spaces for partnerships of students-as-producers, or communities-as-producers with institutions or academic staff? What is the idea of the university where HE seems to be focused on consumption of data, networks, learning, resources, and the curriculum, and migrating this consumption to the cloud? Who should control the means of production in HE? There seems to be little space for denial of the dominant logic of outsourcing-as-privatisation, or technology-as-efficiency-for-learning. Within a logic of higher education as ancillary of business, seen in the Coalition’s cuts agenda and its response to the Browne Review, the privatisation of institutional functions risks HE becoming an edufactory for training/economic provision alone. Harvey saw this emerging in 1986, when he argued that universities were moving from being “guardians of national knowledge to ancillaries in the production of knowledge for global corporations”. As public control of HE as a public good is marginalised, and as we become less well able to think through the relationships of our local activities to global ecology and resources, this risk is amplified.

So I wonder, is the outsourced space one in which democratic governance can be imposed, in the face of the logic of markets? Is the outsourced space one which furthers the enclosure of the commons? Is the outsourced space about marketising higher education for efficiency of technological services before it is privatised for the consumption-of-training-as-learning? Does the outsourced space further remove us from the ecological damage of our resource-intensified life-worlds? Can our work towards open educational models help provide alternatives?

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

December 7, 2011
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

December 7, 2011
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.

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.
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.
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?
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:

Radicalising the curriculum to engage with issues of transformation in political economy, within and across subjects;
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;
Building active connections with radical, alternative groups at local, national, global scale [social centres, reading groups, the WEA, transitions town movements];
Asking questions about what higher education is for, and what social forms best support its outcomes; and
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

December 7, 2011
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.

Technological and organisational forms of production, exchange and consumption.
Relations to nature and the environment.
Social relations between people.
Mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs.
Labour processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects.
Institutional, legal and governmental arrangements.
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

December 7, 2011
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.

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.
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.
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.

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Tag Archives: money

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

Open education, cracks, and the crisis of higher education

The iPad and the essentialism of technology in education