Tag Archives: open education

The true cost of openness


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 1 September 2011

Closure and exclusion

Following his leadership of the successful Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) occupation and work-in of 1971-72, the Communist and trades unionist Jimmy Reid was elected as Rector of the University of Glasgow. In his Rectoral Address Reid argued that

Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today… it is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It’s the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision making.

Since May 2010 the UK’s Coalition Government have been quickening the pace of enclosure of our public spaces; of our exclusion from the preserved, open and shared places in which our society is re-invented. Within this process of exclusion and of enclosing space and time (both the present and, collapsed into it, the future), debt presents itself as a cold and calculating means of collectivised, individual indenture. And the formal, historical University as a site of social contribution, that once lay within and yet against the calculating, coercion of accumulation and the market is closed down within that very logic.

Violence

And in that logic, the processes of exclusion, enclosure and indenture are violent. They do violence to the history of the University. They do violence to the hope and to the reality of higher learning as an escape from socio-environmental crisis. As a result they do violence to the possibility of our collective being and becoming. They do violence to us.

Incarceration (or the kettle)

It is in this violent, enclosing space that the activities of the University emerge and are re-produced. It is in this space that higher learning and its social relationships cycle and re-cycle. It is in this space then that “open” risks becoming a fetish, closed to critique and uncritically cloaked in a veneer of co-production, or sustainability, or value-for-money, or efficiency. It is as if “open” or “openness” offers us liberation or emancipation within the coercive, competitive reality of capital power-over our labour. It is as if “open” might reshape the activities of higher education, in spite of the shackling of the University to accumulation by dispossession and the dictates of the market. So “open” risks becoming a distraction; a wish that we might avoid the incarceration that capital enforces on our labour-power, through the discipline of technological surveillance, order, productivity, efficiency, debt.

Alienation

Thus the institutionalisation of open education risks becoming yet another alienating practice precisely because, as Winn argues, “it is just another way of creating capital out of immaterial labour”. A formalised, institutionalised, “open” education threatens us with: proletarianisation and deskilling through mass-production, automation and standardisation; the totem of efficiency and an increase in the rate of profit; the reification of the resource as product; and pedagogy-as-production, curricula-as-distribution and learning-as-consumption. In our apolitical discourse about the free movement and regeneration of reified things, we risk amplifying the commodification of “open” education through liberal property laws (Creative Commons) that guarantee a level of autonomy to digital objects over and above the rights of teaching (labour) and learning (apprenticeship) from which they are abstracted, and which is placed under the control and supervision of quality assurance, productivity and impact measures.

Crisis

And yet we see the crisis all around us. Our environment is polluted. Our environment is despoiled. Our technologies are underpinned by corporate imperialism, war and human rights atrocities. Our technologies are a mechanism for profit and enclosure and the re-inscription of power. Our world-in-the-cloud is increasingly parcelled off into clearly demarcated, outsourced, privatised applications. And through our outsourced connection to the operation and production of technologies, and our consumption of them within a history of capitalist work, we are displaced from contributing towards worldly wisdom. We are increasingly separated, in part by by the disarming disguise of technology, from the reality of our being. This is our ongoing crisis.

Association

A critique of “open” stands against business-as-usual. It offers “open” as a public concern – a form of contribution that is against what the University is becoming. Its realisation offers safe spaces where associations can be developed. And that is closed to monitoring and ordering and control and profit. And that is against the social re-ordering of our lives for enclosure, the extraction of surplus value and of capitalist valorisation. And that is messy in its social re-formations, in its consumption and in its production, and in how individual contributions are assembled. For as Marx wrote:

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.

And so we might ask what the hacker ethic, and what Lulzsec and Anonymous, offers us? We might ask what open source development offers us? We might ask what a more nebulous, less ordered and monitored and modelled form of “open” offers us? What does openness at the margins, beyond the formally-enclosed institution offer us?

Commons

Dyer-Witheford offers us hope in the histories of the Commons:

A twenty-first century communism must also be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons, which opens possibilities for new combinations of planetary planning and autonomous association.

These histories offer a critique of the ahistorical truisms of our being, that technology and education can only meaningfully serve capitalist expansion, through discourses of order and finance capital that are related to value-for-money, efficiency/productivity/profit, private/public, and the market. The global contribution of skills, alongside stories in which they might be situated, exists in spaces that remain as yet unenclosed. These spaces might be harnessed collaboratively for more than profiteering, or the extraction of surplus value or further accumulation or financialisation, or alienation or violence.

In and beyond technology we teach and re-think these practices and these ways of thinking every day with other staff and students and within our communities of practice. But they need to be politicised in the face of the crisis, because they flow through our being and our power-to create the world. As Marx highlighted

Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.

Autonomy

We need the confidence to imagine that our skills might be shared and put to another use. We need the confidence to defend our physical and virtual commons as spaces for contribution, through production and consumption. We need the confidence to think ethically through our positions. We need the confidence to live and tell a different, overtly political story of “open”.

This might mean less of a focus on “open” and more on “autonomy” against capital. For Tiqqun has argued that

“Autonomy” means that we make the worlds that we are grow. The Empire, armed with cybernetics, insists on autonomy for it alone, as the unitary system of the totality: it is thus forced to annihilate all autonomy whenever it is heterogeneous. We say that autonomy is for everyone and that the fight for autonomy has to be amplified. The present form taken on by the civil war is above all a fight against the monopoly on autonomy. That experimentation will become the “fecund chaos,” communism, the end of the cybernetic hypothesis.


Stories of custom-in-common: history, power and the internet


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 12 July 2011

Brian Lamb has highlighted two quotes that made me think about politics, power, consensus and the web, and most importantly, about History.

David Eaves, Learning from Libraries: The Literacy Challenge of Open Data

Charges of “frivolousness” or a desire to ensure data is only released “in context” are code to obstruct or shape data portals to ensure that they only support what public institutions or politicians deem “acceptable”. Again, we need a flood of data, not only because it is good for democracy and government, but because it increases the likelihood of more people taking interest and becoming literate.

It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.

Paul Mason, Murdoch: the network defeats the hierarchy:

Six months ago, in the context of Tunisia and Egypt, I wrote that the social media networks had made “all propaganda instantly flammable”. It was an understatement: complex and multifaceted media empires that do much more than propaganda, and which command the respect and loyalty of millions of readers, are now also flammable.

Where all this leaves Noam Chomsky’s theory I will rely on the inevitable wave of comments from its supporters to flesh out.

But the most important fact is: not for the first time in 2011, the network has defeated the hierarchy.

These two quotes have emphasized some questions for me.

  1. Against the neoliberal constraint on what can legitimately be fought for, how do we tell stories that reclaim our common history and our social relationships? How do we protect the richness of the technological ecosystems that help us to do this work?
  2. In the rush for technology-as-progress, can we identify how that progress is shaped in our stories of struggle? How do we recognise struggle in our use of technology?
  3. How do we struggle-in-common against the enclosure of our networked public spaces? How do we develop a politics of digital literacy? How do we develop a political digital literacy?

Over a period of six years I wrote about property, the common and political power in Augustan Yorkshire. Revisiting that helps me to identify struggle-in-common over access to resources, be that physical land/cultural rights or immaterial spaces/rights held in common. In the early eighteenth century county elections were an important means by which the political stability and legitimacy of the Augustan and Hanoverian political structures could be ensured. The significance of voters in County [as opposed to Borough] elections in the political system was recognised by contemporaries who saw these ‘forty shilling freeholders’ as the guardian of the nation’s liberty.

To the historian, the importance of the voters hinges upon whether they had any measure of independent political action and power, and how they struggled for their collective rights. Analysis shows that a substantial subset of the electorate had the socio-economic standing, individually or in common, to show a great degree of political independence. Thus, once the politicians forced an election they became involved in a wider nexus of responsibilities which gave the forty shilling freeholders a measure of political power.

Power in networks: a note on shire elections and political power in early-modern England

Notionally the enfranchised county freeholder was a man who voted by right of freehold property that was worth forty shillings per annum clear of all taxes. This also encompassed the possession of a particular office, for example a clerical benefice, as well as annuities, leases for lives, or the control of a mortgage. These men were the bedrock of the county community precisely because of the eighteenth-century elevation of property to a sublime position within society. The marquis of Halifax stated that ‘the interest of the county is best placed in the hands of such as have some share in it’. A share in the land of the county would show a higher political consciousness and entail a recognition of the importance of property and liberty. The importance of shire elections in giving property the opportunity to legitimise or oppose a political outlook meant that any shire election became crucial to the political nation.

The importance of the voters in the political system hinges upon whether they had any independent political action or impact. Were they relatively free to vote as they wanted, or were they subservient to the needs of their social superiors? These issues depend upon the amount of pressure which could be placed upon an individual voter. Investigations related to power and agency help to rescue the voters and the unenfranchised from an impotent limbo, to stress their importance in the political process, and to emphasise the view held by many among the eighteenth century political nation that the ‘forty-shilling freeholder’ was the guardian of the nation’s liberty against over-bearing hegemonies.

A story of struggle in common: power, agency and networked resistance

The importance of local cultural considerations was nowhere stronger than at Hatfield, a lowland agricultural township eight miles north-east of Doncaster. It bordered on Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, and had a large area of common land which had been drained by Dutch immigrants in the seventeenth century. The town numbered between 20 and 31 voters at each election in the early eighteenth century. Whilst the Hearth Tax records of 1672 noted 211 households, there were 350 families in Archbishop Herring’s visitation returns of 1743. Thus, a crude approximation gives Hatfield 1 voter for every 22 families at the 1742 county by-election.

The lords of the manor of Hatfield, which included 8 other townships, were the viscounts Irwin and the manorial framework was important to the functioning of local society. These men were strong in the Whig cause throughout the period and were active at every election except that of 1708 when the new lord was a minor. However, only in 1742 did the Government Whig party achieve a majority of votes in the township. [N.B. at each election there were generally 2 parties with 2 candidates for the 2 shire MPs. Each voter had 2 votes at each election.]

This fractured voting may have had much to do with the franchise in this town which developed through common right. The independence which this gave bolstered the widespread antipathy in the area towards the interference of Irwin in social and economic matters. Prior to the 1695 election Abraham de la Pryme noted that the common at Hatfield ‘is freehold unto us, and the Lord has nothing to do with it’. Moreover, ‘the common-free inhabitants that made above forty shillings a year of their common did, according as formerly, swear themselves worth above forty shillings a year freehold and accordingly polled.’ In a case of trespass which occurred in 1737 it was noted that ‘time out of mind [there] hath been an antient custom to wit that the respective Tenants and occupiers in west field…have inclosed and separated such of their part of the s[ai]d common field…and to hold and enjoy the same…free from any common of pasture.’ In their eyes it gave them rights in common and as political actors.

Local electoral right had emerged from resistance and struggle, and had its basis in the drainage of the area in the late 1620s and early 1630s. In May 1626 the crown and Cornelius Vermuyden came to an agreement about draining the level. By 1629, after a series of disputes and riots, which indicate that the area had a history of direct action against and opposition towards the local landlord, Vermuyden covenanted ‘that he will convey to the tenants of the said manors such portions of the recovered lands as had been assigned to them in respect of their common’.

This acrimonious history of fighting for common rights continued in the eighteenth century. In an argument running from 1726 until 1758, which focused upon the common land, Irwin questioned the landholding rights of the inhabitants. He had a turnpike erected on the common at Stainforth, which provoked a riot and subsequent prosecution that exacerbated the splits within the township. Thomas Perkins after certain inhabitants of the manor signed a submission to Irwin. He wrote, ‘What power he may now have I can’t tell…His Majesty K[ing]: Charles ye 1st w[oul]d not at least…have done a contrary thing.’ This was a powerful analogy to make in comparing the major local landowner to a perceived tyrant.

The very fact that the commons were crucial to the economies of the small farmer, and the feeling that the local balance of power lay with the community rather than the lord, fostered a strong sense of community action and local loyalty. In 1739, Jonathan Parish, who hoped to be made the local schoolmaster, had written to Irwin asking for his favour. Parish reported that ‘by making Lord Irwin my friend [I] had made all my Neighbours my enemies’. Concerning the schoolmaster’s appointment, the local curate Marmaduke Drake, hoped that ‘they were wiser than to be led by ye nose by a Lord’. These men seemed unlikely to defer to any man shy of the monarch; thus, political control may have been illusory at best for a man like Irwin.

This confident air was induced by the strength of the community’s common right. One seventeenth-century commentator noted, ‘by often iteration and multiplication of the Act, it becomes a custom: and being continued without interruption time out of mind, it obtaineth the force of a law’. Similarly, one agrarian historian has written that common field government ‘held the village together’, so that the support for local common rights gave the community a sense of security. In the case of Hatfield this common usage was a form of social, and potentially political cement. Agrarian usage impinged upon the shire franchise and would have added to the difficulties and differences of political control. This would have been more so if those who enjoyed the vote by common right saw a landowner’s actions as an attempt to impoverish them.

The commons were crucial for rearing sheep, oxen horse and pigs, as well as providing thatch, bricks, and sundry extras which bolstered the local economy. Neeson has written that ‘at the local level, custom had the force of the law’. Moreover, if the commons were crucial to the psychological and personal well-being of the individual and the community, then its defence was all-important no matter whom the attacker. The commons gave the individual and the community a chance to live of their own and to survive a dearth. They also gave the chance to have an economic independence that may have fed political autonomy. All this stemmed from what appeared to be enclosure and enfranchisement by consent. There was the strength of custom and usage in terms of the variations in the franchise. As Langford has pointed out ‘faith in local procedures was deeply entrenched’.

Struggle for the common in cyberspace

Which brings me back to my third question:

How do we struggle-in-common against the enclosure of our networked public spaces? How do we develop a politics of digital literacy? How do we develop a political digital literacy?

In Eighteenth century Hatfield, that so many political voters (agents) owned their own lands, and that landownership was so fractured made political control awkward. It simply was not possible for local landowners to brow-beat a majority of men to the polls. The relationship between the politicians and a large subset of the electorate was fragile and conditional. Once the politicians drew the battle lines they were involved in a wider nexus of responsibilities. With this in mind it is hardly surprising that the politicians had to expend so much energy and money to gain an election and maintain some form of control.

I am wondering what this offers in terms of the institutionalisation/enclosure of the internet and the web as a subset of it.

  • How do we struggle to acknowledge and nurture the disparate local contexts and activities born of custom that exist online?
  • How do we recognise power and privilege in networked communities? How does one avoid the real subsumption of the individual within common spaces?

Reflections on the politics of dashboards and Green IT


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 16 June 2011

Howard Noble from the JISC Open to Change project has blogged about the recent energy dashboards event held in Oxford. This event focused upon a number of emerging themes.

  1. How to represent/visualise energy data so that those who use institutional infrastructure can see the impact of their work? An outcome of the work on dashboards was that whilst some are seeking to reveal cost in terms of everyday activities that make sense to individuals, like the equivalent number of cups of tea that could be made, users of energy generally think about [are encouraged to think about?] their energy use as a cost in cash-terms. Money is the dominant metric in this approach to visualisation.
  2. Much of the focus appears, as yet, to be focused on individual behaviour change, rather than seeing this as a mutual, co-operative endeavour. There are plenty of examples of how networks or communities coming together can engage in a discussion about resilience, rather than sustainability, for example, Transitions Towns, Dark Mountain, the Co-operative College. However, this involves a focus, less on personalisation, which is a driving characteristic of societal and educational “value”, and more on mutualism, negotiation and collaboration.
  3. This need to re-focus discussion upon shared use of space and energy within it demands meaningful, long-term, public engagement. This is one of the outcomes of the DUALL project at DMU, and its successor GreenView, which wishes to enter into negotiation with people about “the impacts of our individual and collective actions, notably our increasing energy use and consumption of goods and services.” This includes technologies that are locally-hosted, but also those which are out-sourced to the cloud. Exactly where are we shifting our carbon commitments, so that we can shift any medium-term environmental risk off our short-term balance sheets?
  4. Thus, I think it is important to see energy dashboards in the context of a deliberative process that surrounds the discussion and opening up of visualisation data as a crack in our accepted norms of energy use. The process of opening-up our energy data, and opening up the production process that underpins those data needs to drive a wider discourse around our socio-technical activities within higher education. We need to move away from seeing dashboards as an end in themselves, as a set of data to be turned into a commodity that can be traded, exchanged or quantified in a league table. We need to use those data and their representation as a way to unpick the activities we engage in within Universities. In a draft article [under review], Joss Winn and I look at such activities in light of emissions and peak oil, and argue for a higher education where:
  • educational technology is a public rather than a private or institutionalised good with an acceptance of less energy-intensive, individualised access to processing power;
  • there is prioritisation of digital technologies in strategies for community consensus-building;
  • Universities are networks that act as hubs for local, community-level engagement with technologies, and high-level digital processes;
  • individual access to the web is less of a right than community access, based on a literacy of openness. Open is central;
  • outsourcing decisions are based on community need related to a critical analysis of environmental impact, rather than on a discourse of cost-effectiveness;
  • persistent and on-going procurement and renewal of hardware and software is rejected, in favour of re-use and re-purposing; and
  • students and staff produce and share their open curricula and artefacts, through trans-disciplinary approaches to global crises, like peak oil and climate change.

Engaging with a critique of the Triple Crunch and developing meaningful alternatives means that we need to think beyond business-as-usual, as realised through investments in a Green New Deal or long-term investments or out-sourcing risk and impact, in order to engage socially with the work, tasks and activities of our everyday, educational lives.

This means that we need to move away from a focus on values and attitudes to engaging with the deep, structural issues that are revealed by the work we undertake. How do the teaching, administrative and research processes of the University bind us into unsustainable practices [in terms of peak oil and carbon emissions], and make our communities less resilient? I am thinking of this in terms of our instant, recurrent, personalised, intensive use of energy-through-high-technology. How might energy dashboards and the information they project, help us to open up a dialogue about the ways in which we live our educational lives?

One lesson from the workshop is that we have a tendency to outsource, and that this makes us less well able to engage in a discussion of responsibility at scale. This might be in terms of institutional outsourcing of our carbon, or personal outsourcing of solutions to Government. This point has been reiterated in terms of corporate influence of public policy making and a withering of democratic engagement, in opposition to the social uses of technologies that should enable communities to share in “collaboration, process, experience, expertise, and knowledge”.

This is, of course, more difficult in a space where the rule of money and the invisibility/ubiquity of energy dominate the landscape, and where there is little discussion of complexities like the Jevons Paradox or alternative ways of working. We need to re-think our educational activities, in order to think about dashboards not as the next commodity or means of acquiring research funding, but as indicators of our shared consumption and production. We need fewer futuristic, positivist stories of green technologies, or green energy, and more focus upon our histories of adapting to energy shortages across communities. Meaningful public engagement is critical here, because Universities are located in time and space, and through community activity, external income generation, distance learning and outsourcing, they have a considerable carbon/energy footprint/requirement.

Clearly, this work demands a politics of energy use within and across higher education, which does not just engage students and staff with energy-as-money, but with issues and ideas of peak oil and consumption/production, and with their necessary activities/technologies. Until we have such a deliberative policy, dashboard-related work risks being the next commodity, or end-point, that salves our liberal, democratic consciences about energy use, but which actually change nothing. Hope lies in the dashboard and its production as a cipher for deliberation and socio-cultural change.


The politics of educational technology


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 9 June 2011

Last week Joss Winn reminded me of the urgency of the work that he and I have been doing in the last year around resilience, tied to the impacts of liquid fuel availability/costs, peak oil, climate change and the treadmill logic of capitalism. Reflecting on the triple crunch of energy, economy and emissions, Joss ended his piece by stating that:

“It’s time that a co-ordinated effort was made by the sector to examine these issues in detail, involving academics from across disciplines as well as business continuity managers and VCs. We really do need to start ‘thinking the unthinkable‘…”

Whilst both he and I have been blogging about resilient education for a while, five issues have begun to pinch, which ought to re-focus those of us in higher education and in educational technology, on the politics of our position. These are big issues that threaten to overwhelm us. But they cannot be ignored.

1.    Global socio-political disruption: the media has focused in on what has been termed the Arab Spring, with an overt focus on Libya [see below on oil], and has tended to overlook analyses of tensions in either the United States based on unemployment figures and the deficit, or across Europe in Greece and Spain. This is then connected to issues around youth unemployment, which in turn has implications for discussions of what our higher education is for, and for whom our higher education exists, and who is abandoned by us. We might usefully reflect on the New College of the Humanities farrago, in light of our educational approach to social justice and inclusion. More importantly, in Western economies struggling under the weight of fiscal stimulus, needing to reduce deficits and structural debt, with pensions and an ageing population to consider, the inter-relationship between higher education and the politics of austerity need to be critiqued and alternatives developed. This is especially important in our current political space, because, as Paul Mason notes: “At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future”.

2.    Local socio-political disruption: the emerging neoliberal higher education project is contested. However, we exist in a space where the routine brutalisation of our young people on our campuses is tolerated, where those who dare to criticise established positions of power are termed terrorists, and where our use of social media for local and national organising comes under attack. Neocleous argues that “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.” Higher education should be the battle of ideas. If we truly believe in the transformatory power of social media, then we need to use itto contest these hegemonic positions.

3.    The economy: our framing of higher education rarely considers either the politics of our work or global economic outlook, for example in terms of the threat of a technical US default on its debt or China’s emerging lack of resources. Our planning and our thinking are around business-as-usual, as if higher education existed in a global, political economic bubble, in which the contradictions of capitalism remain someone else’s problem. That’s before we stop to think about the impact on other people of our consumer-driven lifestyles and work and higher education.

4.    Personal and institutional debt: Williams has noted that, in the move from education as a public good to becoming an individual commodity: “student debt, in its prevalence and amounts, constitutes a pedagogy, unlike the humanistic lesson that the university traditionally proclaims, of privatization and the market.” This is reiterated in the development and focus of the New College of the Humanities. However, it also refocuses the future of higher education and its funding mechanisms [in a world that faces the disruptions noted above], and the fear that middle of the road universities will soon be in the middle of a funding crisis. Paul Mason has also highlighted how finance capital in the West repackaged debt and risk in the sub-prime crisis. Are we about to see the same in the form of commodity-trading in student-driven debt? How does a pedagogy of debt enable the resilience of communities-of-practice or individuals?

5.    Energy and climate change: liquid energy is the key issue that we choose to ignore, and which is inextricably tied to the economic issues noted above. This ranges from the impact of geopolitical instability in Libya, to our desperate rush for tar sands in Madagascar, to the problems of energy policy and climate change objectives. So we focus upon green league tables or Masters degrees in the Economics of Transition, and do not consider them within a deeper critique of our dominant political-economic paradigms. Our debt-fuelled higher education is about to be driven by consumption of learning as a commodity. What will be the impact of that increase in economic spending on emissions and energy use? How will that frame resilience?

Technology is implicated throughout these issues, from governmental control/abuse of social media use and data, to feeding fears of anti-intellectualism, and through carbon emissions and the use of liquid energy. More importantly, it also fuels a myth of progress, tied to economic growth and libertarian utility, set apart from a deeper engagement in the history of struggle and the politics of its development and use. We tend to forget our history, in a rush for the future, and where we do remember our memories only stretch as far as Web 1.0. We might use the term Luddite related to technology, but we have no idea of the history of that term and what the Luddites were fighting for, and how technology was implicated through its non-neutrality in that story. The term is pejorative of those deemed anti-progress, and yet the real issue, as Feenberg has argued, is that ” technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle.”

Yet the historian Ellen Meiksins-Wood has noted that:

‘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’.

Our education and our use of technologies are implicated. In order to understand our present position, and to develop alternatives that matter, we need stories and metaphors and critiques of where we are. There are elements of this, for example in the work of Feenberg, but we need a coherent, contextualised history and a politics of educational technology more than ever.

This is emering elsewhere, outside the formalised educational institution. On Sunday night a UKUncut conversation on Twitter opened up a possibility for discussing a history of direct action, using the #DAHistory hashtag. We also have clear examples of where technology has been critiqued and is being developed politically in the form of oppositional spaces. We also have examples of hacktivism and network movements in opposition to the global incorporation of networked technologies. Critiquing power relationships within our use of technology is important because, as DSG have noted “Governments are responding with a conscious and concerted effort to reframe cyber activity and activism as criminality against state and capital, which, no doubt, will soon be upgraded to a form of terrorism. This bears analogies to similar reframing of narratives around workers movements throughout the 19th and 20th Century, not least the “strategy of tension” in Italy in the 1970s.”

In the face of disruptions, and the return of politics in an era of austerity, those of us who work in education and technology might usefully ask: what is to be done?

Postscript: the importance of metaphors and stories of technology-in-education

We have a narrative emerging about the contradictions in the cycles and circuits of capitalism, and the place of technology in those contradictions. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greg de Peuter raise this in terms of games and the creative industries, arguing that the commodification and exploitation of “creatives”, gamers and hacker culture, is a form of “playbor”, which subsumes the desire to play games within the profit-motive. They argue that we need to understand this process of subsumption, in order to find ways around it, and to challenge it. These challenges might echo the revelations about of Sony’s attempts to silence speech that reveals security flaws about its PlayStation hardware, or they might echo the emergent history of hacktivism against Sony. Both de Peuter and Dyer Witheford argue that the dominant narratives of educational technology, for example of Web 2.0 technology as user-generated and hence emancipatory, or of learning analytics as allegedly leading to efficient, personalised teaching and learning, or of technology as implicitly progressive, need to be critiqued within a more substantive history of capitalism and the western, liberal state.

In doing this, Dyer Witheford argues for an alternative narrative, one of possibility, framed by the revitalisation of the commons:

“A twenty-first century communism must also be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons, which open possibilities for new combinations of planetary planning and autonomous association.”

This narrative of the insertion of global networks of capital within higher education feeds a second metaphor, that of the shock doctrine. Klein’s work on shock opens up a way of viewing what Hardt and Negri call Empire and what those who follow Deleuze and Guattari frame as immaterial labour within a networked reimagining of our global social relationships. We might now usefully work in common to reveal the impact of this shock within UK higher education, on issues of debt as a form of indentured labour, and of the discipline of the kettle and order, and of the ways in which states attempt to utilise technologies to impose order and control. Such a revelation demands rhizomatic or permeable working across disciplinary boundaries, in ways which develop resilient alternatives to dominant, powerful narratives of the purposes of our lives.

Each of these stories offers hope. Hope in that we might use them as metaphors to help us explain our world, in light of global crises; in order to understand how our behaviours and our cognitive dissonance impacts consumption and production in this world. As a result we might try to build something different. In the worst case scenario, these stories might help us work with others to become more resilient at scales and in networks that matter to us.

These stories enable us to critique in common the ahistorical truisms of liberal democracy, that technology and education can only meaningfully serve capitalist expansion, through discourses of finance capital that are related to value-for-money, efficiency, private/public, and the market. A global range of skills, alongside stories in which they might be situated, exist in spaces that remain as yet unenclosed. These spaces might be harnessed collaboratively for more than profiteering, or the extraction of surplus value or further accumulation or financialisation, or alienation. We teach and re-think these skills and these ways of thinking every day with other staff and students and within our communities of practice. We need the confidence to imagine that our skills might be shared and put to another use. We need the confidence to defend our physical and virtual commons as spaces for production and consumption. We need the confidence to think ethically through our positions. We need the confidence to live and tell a different story of the purpose of technology-in-education.


The Empire of things: our mobile and our dehumanisation


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 12 May 2011

“There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.”

Joseph Conrad in Nostromo

 On BBC Radio 4 last night, Johann Hari spoke about the devastating war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hari looked historically and materially at this war, which has seen more than 5 million people killed in over a decade of fighting, along with human rights’ abuses including gang-rape, mutilation, and enforced militarisation of young boys and men. Moreover, Amnesty International have consistently argued that those seeking to protect and enhance human rights in the DRC suffer threats and intimidation, and that the public administration has also utilised “excessive use of lethal force, arbitrary arrest and detention and enforced disappearances”.

Hari’s historical point critiques the dominant western narrative about this conflict, which has tended to view the war as connected to the Rwandan civil war and genocide, and which has post-colonial overtones framed by moral, ethical and cultural development. Instead, Hari emphasized the material importance of the DRC’s mineral deposits, and in particular Coltan, which

“is essential for the power-storing parts of cell phones, nuclear reactors, Play Stations, and computer chips. Coltan is increasingly exploited in the mountains in the conflict torn eastern part of the country. The Rwanda and Uganda backed rebels have primary control over the ore and are reaping huge profits which maintain and finance the protracted war. It is estimated that the Rwandan army made $20 million per month mining coltan in 2000. As coltan is necessary for the high-tech industry and as demand increases, motivation to pull out of the DRC by Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi decreases.”

So, it is argued that these minerals are “the driving forces for war”, and that those who benefit are multi-national corporations involved in western high-tech innovation and development. A recent UN Experts’ Report argued that

“exporters and consumers of Congolese mineral products should step up their due diligence efforts by publicly disclosing evidence that would demonstrate that they are not knowingly purchasing tainted minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Too many comptoirsare exploiting the legal distinction between themselves and negociants to claim they do not know the origin of the minerals they purchase, when clearly they often do, and, if they do not, it would be fairly easy to find out.”

This implicates me in that war and in that gang-rape and in that child labour, and demands that, at the very least, I ask the multinational company from which I buy my next device from where they source the minerals that are extracted for its production.

Yet I am also implicated and enmeshed within the web of a global market, in which the commodification of subjectivity is paramount, and in which my power is limited. One of the issues here is the functioning of what Hardt and Negri have called Empire, a new planetary regime in which the economic, military, administrative and communicative components combine into a system of power “with no outside”. Empire is a twenty-first century critique of global capital, which now taps its subjects as labour-power and also as consumers, learners and raw materials. Deleuze and Guattari have also argued the case that capitalism is now a planetary “production machine”, assembled from flows of labour, finance and technology, where the quest for profit drives new technical machines, new products and practices, cracks old habits, and throws all bounded domains or territories (that are geographic, social and subjective) into upheaval. It then reterritorialises these domains through enclosure, policing and commodification.

For Hardt and Negri, Empire is a regime of Foucauldian biopower, exploiting social, subjective and biological life in its entirety, for profit. So Empire and the transnational corporations that form nodes of power within it, and whose networks are circuits for accumulation and profit, covers all of our lives, though marketing, game-play, work, privatisation of public assets, data mining, advertising, the constant renewal and upgrades of technologies etc.. Critics like Virno, Tronti, Hardt and Negri have related the power of Empire to what is termed “immaterial labour” that is “the labor that produces the informational, cultural, or affective element of the commodity.” Our desire for play or for the latest device feeds Empire and the commoditisation of everyday life. This is the Empire of Things, supported by a socially diffuse intellectuality and set of desires, which is in turn generated by a vast educational apparatus.

It is not just in the DRC where these issues of high-tech needs feeding alienating behaviours are being uncovered. There are reports of workers’ rights being abused in FoxConn factories in China, which supply Apple, of game-farming in virtual sweatshops for western clients, of alleged tax avoidance by mobile phone operators against the common good. Yet the webs of Empire, its transnational circuits of raw materials, value and power keep those of us who notionally benefit from the immiseration of others at a distance from the effects of our consumption. We are disconnected from the implications and outcomes of our actions in queuing for and consuming the iPad2 or whichever new technology we favour. Instead, our discourse and our spectacle is about whether this new Chinese corporation might threaten Apple’s iPhone dominance, or the implications of that fragmentation of Android as a platform for App development, and its concomitant threat to Google’s business model. More occasionally it is about how our western, liberal data-rights are being infringed, or about how the police are using mobile technology to target protesters, or upon the impact of mobilles on bee populations. It is almost never about gang-rape and vaginal mutilation in Africa.

Virno argued that Empire keeps truths in the world at a safe distance, so that excessive consumption, equivocation over morality and ridicule of marginalised voices can enable endless, repetitive practices of commodification in a world where there are seen to be no alternatives. Cynicism becomes the defining feature of the emotional situation of our politics today – what on earth can we do about such powerlessness and distress? There is one final point that illuminates this cynicism, and that is the attack on humanities and critical theory by western governments. We are seeing UK Universities radically restructuring their academic portfolios in the name of business and the market. We are seeing a political attack on the nature and meaning of history. We are seeing a world in which the future is collapsed into the present, in order that we chase progress and development and the next upgrade. We are seeing what Marx called the annihilation of space by time. We do not stop to consider what we are doing, and alternative narratives are subject to ridicule.

At the CAL11 conference, when I presented a paper on the political economy of educational technology [slide 30], I was asked “just what are you expecting us to do”? My answer at the time was that I am not expecting you to do anything. But that I am expecting you to critique your position; to think about the ramifications of your activities and consumption; to think about your humanity. So, what is to be done by individuals and educators? Virno argues that the dominant order is destroyed “not by a massive blow to the head, but through a mass withdrawal from its base, evacuating its means of support”. This exodus also constructs a new alternative. It is defection as reconstruction, and relates to what Hardt and Negri have termed the Multitude. The multitude refers to new movements opposing global capital. It is a refusal to submit to the rule of money. The multitude refers to subjective capacity, social movement and political protest. Where these coalesce they point beyond Empire, through the realisation of alternatives.

However, we need to develop places to discuss what might be “beyond”, and how that might function. This demands that we critique the realities of our uses of technology. Hardt and Negri note that “Machines and technologies are not neutral and independent entities. They are biopolitical tools deployed in specific regimes of production, which facilitate certain practices and prohibit others.” Our engagement with devices leads Hardt and Negri to argue that “the multitude not only uses machines to produce, but also becomes increasingly machinic itself, as the means of production are increasingly integrated into the minds and bodies of the multitude.” This is developed by Dyer Witheford and de Peuter, who argue that whilst devices are enslaving, this is not to deny that they are pleasurable, but we need to recognise how that pleasure itself channels power.

Clearly global solutions are required to the catastrophes outlined by Hari in the DRC. However, I need to think about the following in my life and in my practice.

  • How do I lobby vendors, providers, re-sellers, commissioners, in order that they justify the extraction of the materials, and the production processes, that they use for their products? How do I do this in association with others and in my daily work?
  • How do I work for technological decisions, like procurement, outsourcing etc., to be based on community need related to a critical analysis of socio-environmental impact and human rights, rather than on a discourse of cost-effectiveness, monetisation, economic value, and efficiency?
  • How do I work for the use of technology in open education, rather than in a post-colonial discourse focused upon new markets?
  • How do I lobby for consensus in open systems architectures, focused upon open-sourced, community designed and implemented technologies? How do I argue that educational technology is a global and public, rather than a private or institutionalised, good?
  • How do I work for a digital or technological literacy that is ethical? How do I work up an ethics of digital literacy?
  • How do I think about the history and not the future of educational technology, so that I understand the ramifications of my actions and consumption?
  • How do I campaign for alternatives, within our everyday capitalist reality, in order to look beyond it? Where does social technology fit in that revolutionary space?

Joseph Conrad wrote about the social and material history of the Congolese, as their land was despoiled and as they were colonised in the nineteenth century. He referred to the broader colonization of Africa in an essay as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration”. As an educational technologist I need to rediscover my history, in order to reclaim my humanity.


OER, capital and critical social theory


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.


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


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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4.  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.


Student-as-producer: reflections on social protest, social media and the socio-history of re-production


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 16 November 2010

I was taken with Mike Neary’s description of the 10th November national demonstration by students, staff and supporters of HE as a public good. It was important that Mike called his piece “History (Change) in the Making”, in order to highlight the possibilities for fusing the production of our futures through an engagement with the past. In the quest for progress, too often we dismiss any attempt at critique of our present moment as historically-situated, especially in terms of our use of technology. Too often we make claims for technology in education as progressive because we believe it enhances engagement or participation or the value of a student as a knowledge worker, and this tends to be collapsed into a discourse around employability. However, a more critical, democratic reappraisal of our shared positions in the academy, underpinned by socio-historical narratives, rather than socio-technical ones, is being focused by Neary through the student-as-producer project. This project is working in the institution, against neoliberal views of the curriculum-as-consumption, to move beyond prescribed social relations. Neary notes that:

“Student as Producer is not only about encouraging students to produce products, whether in the form of artistic objects and/or research outputs. Student as Producer extends the concept of production to include ways in which students, as social individuals, affect and change society, so at [sic.] to be able to recognise themselves in the social world of their own design.”

In relating the project to the protest, he powerfully highlights that the students in London were not those who will feel the cold-wind of fees, and yet they were standing-up for higher education as a public good. He also stated that they could see that “the lack of money is a constant grinding relentless reality”, which diminishes us all. This diminishing of education and our social relations in the face of externally-imposed, economic necessity reminds us “how the power of money has so overwhelmed human sociability that it now seems like a natural phenomena, rather than the outcome of an oppressive social process. And, as such, it appears impossible to resist.” Critically, as the Rector of Edinburgh University, Iain MacWhirter, noted, this means that in the name of supporting coercive capitalism and the financialisation of our economy and life-world, prospective undergraduate students must mortgage their futures before they can consider a traditional mortgage.

One of the critical outcomes from the protest was around the importance of re-politicising the question of what higher education is for, not just amongst academics and established intellectuals, but also amongst others who benefit from the forms of HE. I do not know whether the students engaged on the NUS/UCU demo regard themselves as intellectuals, activists, citizens, agents or whatever. However, the ability of 50,000 people physically to see 49,999 other people, alongside brass bands, drummers and carnival grotesques, is an important moment in radicalising and re-imagining what our concrete, living experiences of higher education might be. This re-politicising offers the promise of a re-imagining and a re-production of the forms of higher education.

In this way the reality of this national event was its appearance as a crack in the dominant form of resourcing, sharing and delivering HE. As a crack in the dominant moment of higher education it forces other students, academic and professional services staff, society, workers, the state, to grapple with alternatives, or at least to defend their orthodoxies. This is important because, as Holloway argues, this is a disruption in the dominant logic of our social determination. He quotes: “We shall not accept an alien, external determination of our activity, we shall determine ourselves what we do”. For Holloway, moving away from imposition and alienation, towards automomies of doing is a critical, radical moment. I wonder the extent to which Wednesday was important because of the spaces it prescribed for autonomous activity.

The value of actual, living experiences, where fellowship can be described and re-formed through direct action in the world, shines through this crack. Whilst I tweeted my descriptions of activity from the demonstration [as activists have done in a range of spaces before], and whilst Twitter enabled newsrooms to manage live representations of activity, social media only ever remained a second-order instrument, as a reporting tool, or a mechanism to disseminate information, or to re-publish live information. After the fact it gave a way for me to re-interpret lived events and to correlate that with those of others. My ability to use social media to reflect on my position in relation to a range of others is critical. [Note that there is a wealth of vimeo footage, #demo2010 tweets and blog postings about the protest.] However, social media only described a representation of our power to recast the world; it described a possibility, or a space where radical moments might be opened-up; it was never, of itself, that re-presentation without taking the form of concrete action-in-the-world.

One of the great spin-offs of the use of social media by the protest movement is the ability of autonomous groups to see their peers exercising their power-to re-create the world. Technologies are a means through which the idea of the university is being critiqued, or through which the possibilities of collective and co-operative re-productions of higher education are being discussed ahead of concrete action-in-the-world. In this way autonomous movements in Popular Education, student protests in Italy, automonist student collectives in the UK, an Education Camp in Parliament Square, and planned and actual student occupations based on teach-ins and the historical, educational experiences of radical communities, are engaging with social media as a means of re-producing their living experiences of higher education. It is this latter point that is central. Technology in and for education is at once an external portrayal of a living reality, and a means of re-inforcing the ways in which established cultures are being challenged. This is why its use by students-as-producers is so energising, where it is keyed into: their social relations and their relationships with the environment; their production and governance processes; their conceptions of the world; and the conduct of their daily life that underpins their social reproduction.

The view of students-as-producers connects to Collini’s case for the Humanities, which moves us beyond the economy and its reductive/hostile positioning of the academy, towards the need for a public discourse on the nature of the university as a public good. Collini urges us to move away from a discourse framed by the power assumed by the state in the name of the taxpayer, to reconsider our educational and socially-mediated values. In the struggle for higher education, in moving away from formulae of impact, excellence and assurance, Collini urges us to engage with issues of trust and “contestable judgements”. This is exactly what the use of social media by students-as-producers is hinting at, in particular addressing the contested meaning of constructed positions, especially the socio-historical positions taken by coercive capitalism.

This issue of engagement with socio-historical positions is underlined by Zizek who argues that we need to reappraise ourselves of what “interesting times” actually means, in terms of the consequences of socio-cultural, economic and environmental dislocations. He argues that it is not newness that is interesting, but how the new and the old are mixed. Otherwise our present fiction, in which the future as defined by the dominant form of capital, will continue to function as our dominant, living culture. Zizek argues that our socio-historical culture, and our understanding of the past is critical here in developing “a culture of tolerance, this is a culture of its own, not just being open to the other, but open towards the other in the sense of participating in the same struggle.” One of the pivotal points that he raises is that in order “to change a view you must reveal the extent of your oppression.” Social media is one such way in which students and academics are revealing this in their living experiences.

This mixing of a socio-historical critique of our social relations, our ability to produce our world, and technology is needed to engage with any work on futures. In this, no meaningful engagement with technology in education matters beyond the question of what is higher education for? Keri Facer has argued that we need to ask some serious questions and whether our hegemonic educational systems, oriented towards accreditation in the current economy are viable. She has asked what sorts of worlds do we want to live in, what skills and relationships do we wish to encourage, how do we integrate education into our communities?

These are big questions, and they sit uneasily alongside our view of UK HE and economic growth through, for instance, internationalisation agendas. Can we really look to extend market share in a world where countries like India, South Africa and China are expanding their domestic, higher education provision to support their own economic growth? However, more importantly, how does higher education react to, and plan within, critical international issues of political economy, like banking bailouts and structural trade deficits. What value futures’ planning for higher education in these scenarios, beyond blind faith in business-as-usual?

Facer argues that we are not having right conversations about HE, that Browne is a symptom of a failure to have debate over what HE is for and how it should be funded. She states that we need “a serious public debate about education” and speaks for a critique of socio-technical change rooted in an analysis of the radical possibilities of the curriculum. In this she sees universities as democratic public spaces, which need to be reinvigorated. Where we have the university as servant of the knowledge economy and no more, where our lives are based on technical skills alone, we will see radical socio-economic polarisation and economic inequality. We need to imagine alternatives tied more closely to needs/aspirations of our communities.

The realpolitik of this is that new funding models framed in the name of sustainability, as outcomes of the shock doctrine, increase our alienation from imposed social determinations visited through manifestations of business-as-usual. I would argue that the key to grappling with Facer’s question of what HE is for, is a meaningful socio-historical critique of the forms of higher education. Within that the use of technology is an area of activity interconnected with concrete activities and decisions that can be described, compared, offered and critiqued. The current use of social media by students in producing new, radical moments for the university is a valuable starting point for fighting for the idea of higher education. In planning alternatives to prescribed futures, we must recover our socio-historical positions. Students-as-producers have demonstrated how critical engagement with technology in education may offer hope in this praxis.


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


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 4 November 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 29 October 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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