Tag Archives: politics

Debate: are Universities a public good?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 4 February 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also:

http://www.learnex.dmu.ac.uk/2010/11/29/reimagining-the-university-autonomous-and-co-operative-re-production/

http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/the-edgeless-university

http://collapsonomics.posterous.com/causes-mapping-the-layers-of-explanation

 


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.


Reimagining the university


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 29 November 2010

I spent a wonderful day with students at the Really Open University programme of events last Friday, in occupation of the Michael Sadler lecture theatre at the University of Leeds. The day revealed the deeply thoughtful and critical nature of the autonomous, inclusive student movements that are emerging in the face of the Coalition’s cuts agenda. The meaningful and productive work of occupation is demonstrating how students are re-defining and re-producing their social roles.

The students in Leeds raised big questions for higher education.

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

The students organised an amazing symposium of activities, involving discussion of:

  • the attempts at autonomous educational experiences of Italian students after the earthquake in 2008, in the face of institutionalised, state and mafia controls. A key message was that these students believed in and fought for “a fairer, non-commodified education”;
  • the experiences in occupation of Reclaim The Streets, Sussex University students, and students in Switzerland, with a focus on disrupting and liberating spaces, in order that they do not replicate, reinforce or recreate power relationships;
  • alternative views of the social forms of the University, through proposed social science centres and the University of Utopia.

In the discussions the use of space was central. This was reinforced by the fact that when I walked into the main lecture theatre I was hit by its customisation by its occupiers as a living and lived-in place that made sense to them. It combined education with shelter, and with food, and with belonging. It reminded me of the ways in which guests at Birmingham Christmas Shelter fight to assert themselves and to colonise their space in that shelter. In fact, the power of the experience had me questioning whether education is both occupation and shelter; or whether in some form education acts as occupation shelter, in order for students and academics to build spaces to transform the world.

The focus on spaces for transformation has been shown in the levels of solidarity from across the globe within and between student movements, which are increasingly being revealed as attempts at non-hierarchical, co-operative organisation. In developing this type of approach, the University for Strategic Optimism argues for “A university based on the principle of free and open education, a return of politics to the public, and the politicisation of public space”. In this, social media use is highlighting the power of solidarity in autonomous movements. This is being realised through, for example, the proliferation of WordPress blogs on the open web managed by student groups; though examples of sharing and discussing actions using SKYPE; through the use of Twitter/Facebook to draw more interested parties in to discuss actual action; the use of multimedia to share lived and living experiences in the world; and through dance-offs. Part of the beauty of these examples is their interconnectedness and their lack of a formal, social media strategy or of institutionalisation. That these on-line spaces are being colonised, de-marketised, and re-claimed, offers us hope beyond the issue of education cuts, for wider opposition to the increasing enclosure and privatisation of the web.

This reclamation, whilst negating claiming ownership or property rights, highlights the drive towards personal and co-operative autonomy in a living and commonly-owned space. The students who were arguing for transformation were engaging with what Marx called “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”. This highlights an anti-institutionalised, anti-controlling description of the social forms of higher education, where barriers, separation, differences and transitions all need to be critiqued. So these occupations-as-education force us to examine the contexts in which roles like academics, managers, administrators and students are created, and the powers that they represent/realise/reproduce. This non-hierarchical, co-operative approach to social relationships makes monitoring and controlling the use of social media uncomfortable, and has ramifications for those dealing in institutionalised educational technology.

In this crisis, the critical social theory that underpins student-as-producer or which defines a pedagogy of excess may become central. These ideas define a movement beyond the present state of things. They do not replicate a curriculum-as-consumption, or a curriculum-for-business-as-usual. They view the curriculum critically through the lens of political economy and through our relationships in, and technologies for, the processes of producing the curriculum. The relationships between students and academics, entwined in praxis, and developing and defining an active, socio-historical curriculum are central to meaningful transformation. In the current crisis, students are defining radical moments through which we might re-imagine the university.


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.


Open education, cracks, and the crisis of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 26 October 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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


The iPad and the essentialism of technology in education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 September 2010

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

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

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

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

Social exclusion and digital Britain


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 27 April 2009

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

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

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

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

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


Digital inclusion, education and the future of the web


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 6 May 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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