Tag Archives: technology

Educational futures, educational technology and digital social media


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 7 July 2010.

The application of Futures’ planning and thinking in the development of higher education is receiving more attention, and in particular is catalysing researchers and practitioners to discuss frames of reference, methods, and ethics for thinking about futures’ planning. The work of FutureLab on Beyond Current Horizons, was synthesised by Facer and Sandford in addressing technology futures. They critiqued much that was taken-for-granted in the use of educational technology, noting that (p. 75): “the ‘imaginary’ upon which future-oriented projects are premised often takes for granted the contemporary existence of and continued progress towards a universal, technologically-rich, global ‘knowledge economy’, the so-called ‘flat world’ of neo-liberal rhetoric”. As I noted elsewhere in challenging positivist views of technology, Facer and Sandford ‘ask much more critical questions of “the chronological imperialism of accounts of inevitable and universal futures”. This accepts the complexity of the use of technology, of societal development, and of political economy, and asks us to consider some of the ethical imperatives. In addressing these we have a chance to re-think our values.’

Our humane values are critical in defining the theory, methods and ethics of futures-oriented research in education. In the introduction to his latest e-book, The Biggest Wake-Up Call in History, Richard Slaughter highlights the values-driven, hopeful opportunities that underpin an integral approach. An integral approach might enable societies to take a respectful and generous stance to the interpretation of and engagement with the “‘signals’ that are being constantly generated within the global system, [and therefore] as we become aware of their import and actively respond to them, then a deeper, richer, understanding emerges”. Slaughter’s work is important for education, and those who work with technology, because his integral approach highlights the importance of taking a proactive role in critique and action, around transitions to new ways of being and living, in the face of climate change, peak oil and the dominant, neoliberal ideology of political economy. Education has to work with these external issues in planning its possible futures. One strand of this that needs greater critique is technology and digital social media.

Slaughter asks two important questions in addressing these issues.

  1. How can so many contributions fit together within a coherent whole?
  2. How can many different kinds of truth be honoured and adjudicated?

In respecting complexity, pluralism and difference, the onus is on us all to look at ways of planning for transitions rather than waiting to adapt to shock. This may involve taking on-board relevant historical lessons, in order to stand for a position of “Science and technology + foresight + moral courage”. This interrelationship of science and technology, humanism and the liberal arts is critical in any approach to futures’ thinking, in particular because difficult, inclusive, ethical decisions need to be made around the pressures of population, affluence and the environment, and the possibilities of technology.

One of the questions with which I have come away is how are those of us involved in educational technology and digital social media actively engaged in futures work? Is there a sense in which these communities are futures literate? How do these communities of practice enable the critique of technology and the possibilities for the uses of educational technology, in both the process of creating the future and the outcomes of those processes [what is actually done as well as how this happens]? In engaging with social media and in touting personalisation, how are we looking at values and customs in common?

I return to this issue of values because it is important and is one that technologists ought to address, especially in underpinning our activity and what we do in the world. In part, this reflects Holloway’s “power-to”, and his focus on doing as an emancipatory activity, in direct opposition to others’ “power-over” us and our labour. Doing and activity are crucial, but need to be seen in light of our shared humanity. Dowrick reminds us that the ways in which we live our lives should be driven by humane values that can help us overcome disruption, namely: courage; fidelity; restraint; generosity; tolerance; and forgiveness. Those of us who drive forward the use of technology has a duty to foreground these issues in ensuring that we do not contribute to individual alienation, the taylorisation of work, or the fetishisation of tools.

In engaging with technology and social media, I see decisions being made to enact our values. In this way there is space for activism, and the creation of pedagogies of excess, supported by the use of technology and social media. However, we need to ask more often what do “we” want to be and why? Why do we want to do what we do with technology? How does, for example, Twitter enable our shared humane values? How do we allow Facebook’s form and function to (de-)humanise us? Who is marginalised/empowered on-line in a virtual learning environment, and what does this outcome say about us? Do we allow mobile technologies to enable or prevent us from doing and creating? How does our understanding of the present and our work with educational technology in the present enable us to plan for the future? My use of “we” and “our” and “shared” is critical.

Analysing the present is an important issue. Do we properly understand why and how technology and social media are being (ab)used in the present, and how and why they help us to act/react now? Or are we simply accepting dominant hegemonic positions about the use of technology in education? When we make statements about engagement, participation, marginalisation do we critique those statements? How do we use those statements, and our approaches and needs, underwritten by our core, humane values, to help communities of practice to develop their own solutions to problems? I see this as a starting point for enabling a discussion about futures that utilises technology to enhance our humanity, and to move us from the fetishisation of the digital towards communal solutions to significant problems.


How might current and future trends in technology affect educational leadership?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted on Learning Exchanges on 13 July 2010.

At DMU’s Leadership and Management Conference, Mike Robinson [Director of ISAS] and I ran a workshop on “How might current and future trends in technology affect leadership at DMU?” The purpose of the session was to enable staff to share aspirations, revisit key trends in the strategic development of institutional IT, and to analyse the development of TEL at DMU as a case study, before identifying key short/medium-term priorities for their teams. The key outcomes raised by the mix of academic and support staff are noted below.

What are your aspirations for your use of technology as a leader?

  • Demands effective leadership that is proactive rather than reactive.
  • Enhanced processes/controls [automation and infrastructure].
  • Integrated management information to inform and support decisions, including finance.
  • Enhanced administration/efficiency of teaching tasks, including distance learning.
  • Improve communication of information, document management.
  • Mobility and remote working.
  • Meeting staff/student expectations.
  • Interest in short-term innovation within a long-term view.

Can you define a short and medium-term priority for your team in utilising technology?

  • Aspirational strategy for DMU, which is suitable and sustainable.
  • Having a typology of technology allows for flexibility/innovation and security/comfort factor for some staff.
  • Culture change away from paper towards the use of data repositories, recorded webinars etc..
  • Joined-up systems/thinking – synergy/seamless..
  • Planning; communications; identify support.
  • Engagement with what is currently available – how can it help me?
  • Feedback from team about what works/needs attention.
  • Developing approaches to Open Educational Resources.
  • Matching possibilities with University procurement and decision-making processes.
  • Develop a knowledge base on non-DMU systems, and contextualisation of use.
  • Training and support.
  • Innovation, investment, resourcing.
  • Open mind, agile and flexible.

Can you identify key barriers to this?

  • Culture change. We are in a faster world, with no space to think, where staff need to be subject specialists and technologically aware. What does this mean for relationships between staff/students/university?
  • Need for enhanced collaboration between services/faculties and the use of champions/pioneers.
  • Top-down strategy and cultural bias that impacts staff fears/increases resistance,
  • IT as a distraction; the need to follow the crowd; buy-in; resistance to change. Speed of change, and lack of engagement/awareness.
  • Better communication about reviews/developments.
  • Lack of support [resources for innovation].
  • Lack of testing of new technology; being wedded to certain providers is restrictive.
  • Sourcing everything from the private sector.
  • Security of the environment.
  • Green fingers – work/teach remotely.

The headlines for me from the session were three-fold, and connect into the work we are undertaking around a vision for TEL at DMU.

  1. Staff focused on a vision for joined-up systems, including access to management information, learning technologies and communications tools, which can enable both effective decision-making/controls and curriculum/work innovation.
  2. Developing a joined-up approach requires staff participation in the development and delivery of a longer-term, aspirational strategy for DMU in engaging with technology. This strategy should help staff innovate in their activity/tasks/work with the tools that they already have at hand in the short-term, so that they are ready to innovate with new tools and to manage change in the longer-term.
  3. Sustainability, in terms of: the curriculum; our human relationships; our data; our infrastructures; our use of energy and natural/manufactured resources; is very important. How we develop “green fingers” in our use of IT is a priority and a responsibility for us all, in developing a resilient higher education.

 


Open education: the need for critique


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted on Learning Exchanges on 27 July 2010.

**This post is a set of personal reflections on open education, and the fetishised nature of Open Educational Resources [OERs], and arises from the JISC/HEA-hosted Open Educational Resources International Symposium. It is framed by posts about the Democratic University and the Political Economy of Openness.

Open education is a critique of our formal, institutionalised systems of education. Or it should be. It should help us to critique what we do as educators in a formal system and why. It reflects back to us how our work enables the people who experience our formal systems, to exist, to innovate, to succeed, to be(come). An engagement with the possibilities for open education enables us to examine our “power-to” change our social relations, rather than to exist in a state where some-one or some-thing has “power-over” our work and our selves.

The possibilities of open education include our ability to create spaces for reflecting upon our participation in the activity and labour of (self-) discovery and (self-) invention, and change. However, participation is an often co-opted word, which is de-based to a form of therapeutic engagement between individuals whose power-to govern and create in a situation/activity is markedly different. These differences impact how our work is constructed, and how it is perceived and valued. Our power-to govern a learning situation and the work that is actually done in it, and to re-invent the social relationships that frame it, are based on our agency in the world. There is a balance here between our individual and communal approaches to the process of participation.

Therefore, democratic practices in education are critical in enhancing our broader socio-educational life, and underpin radical re-conceptualisations of educational practice, for example mass intellectuality, a pedagogy of excess and student-as-producer. Marx’s Eighth Thesis on Feuerbach notes that “All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.“ One of the cracks in the formal education system that open models of education demonstrate to us is the hope for partnership and co-governance of learning between different actors in shared practices.

A second, co-opted and often de-based word is “revolution”, especially when coupled to “learning”, and tied to the creation of open educational resources. Marx’s oft-quoted Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach states “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Is this what is meant by “learning revolution”? Where we use that term do we mean radically change our social relations, or the ownership and aggregation of the means of production? Or are we reducing the power of the meaning of “revolution”, so that it becomes a change in the method of “participation” or a change in the technological mode of production? Marx notes in his First Thesis on Feuerbach that we need to “grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity”. Revolution implies a process of struggle and transformation in our social relations, towards an entirely different mode of both production and distribution of goods and services, and towards a different form of collective social (or in this case educational) order. To use the term learning revolution demands a critique of the political economics of education, and the social relations that exist therein. This cannot be done in terms of OERs without an engagement with critical pedagogy.

As a result, it is interesting to re-evaluate the ways in which we think about allegedly radical educational projects/arguments, in particular:

In each of these discussions, there are a number of risks.

  1. That the role/importance of individual rather than social empowerment is laid bare, and that within a libertarian educational structure, the focus becomes techno-determinist. The risk here is that, accepting the position of others in meaningful, socially-constructed tasks, technology is the driver for individual emancipation [although we rarely ask “emancipation for or from what?”]. Moreover, we believe that without constant innovation in technology and technological practices we cannot emancipate/empower ever more diverse groups of learners.
  2. That we deliver practices that we claim are radical, but which simply replicate or re-produce a dominant political economy, in-line with the ideology of accepted business models. So that which we claim as innovatory becomes subservient to a dominant mode of production and merely enables institutions to have power-over our products and labour, rather than it being a shared project [witness the desire for HE to become more business-like].
  3. That we fetishise the outcomes/products of our labour as a form of currency. This is especially true in the case of open educations resources, which risk being disconnected from a critique of open education or critical pedagogy, and PLEs which risk being disconnected from a critique of their relationship to our wider social relations.
  4. That we fetishise the learner as an autonomous agent, able to engage in an environment, using specific tools and interacting with specific OERs, so that she becomes an economic actor, rather than seeing her engagement as socially emergent and negotiated.

David Harvey notes that changing the world is more complex than a technological fix, and requires us to recognise and engage in the critique of an assemblage of other activities or practices. Harvey argues that there are seven activity areas that underpin meaningful social change:

  1. technological and organizational 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; and
  7. the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

These areas impact the broader projects with which we engage. As a result a number of questions arise, especially around open education and OERs.

  1. How do we prioritise engagement with the broader, open context of learning and education, with trusted peers? How do we raise our own literacy around openness, in order to legitimise sharing as social practice and as social process, and not as a response to a target of OER-production-as-SMART-objective?
  2. Is the production of OERs a means of furthering control over our means of production and our labour? Is there a risk that the alleged transparency of production of OERs is used to further control and power-over, for example, teachers and teaching by impacting contracts of employment?
  3. Though education, how do we enable the types of participatory engagement and re-production of groups like the Autonomous Geographies Collective or Trapese, where the production of OERs is a secondary outcome to the re-fashioning of social relationships that it enables? By so doing, we might just enable groups to engage with the activity-areas that Harvey highlights as a process of production, rather than fetishising the production of things.
  4. How do we resist the increasing discourse of cost-effectiveness, monetisation, economic value, efficiency that afflicts our discussion of open education? How do we move the argument around sustainability and open education away from a focus on economic value? Too often our discussion of open education is reduced to a discussion of OERs and this, in turn, is reduced to a discourse of cost and consumption. As a result, our role in education is commodified and objectified.
  5. Do we ask who is margnalised in the production of OERs or in open education? Are non-Western cultures engaging in open education and the production of OERs through the languages of colonialism or by focusing on native socio-cultural forms? At what point do OERs and open education become part of a post-colonial discourse focused upon new markets?
  6. How do we utilise OERs to open-up trans-disciplinary approaches to global crises, like peak oil and climate change? How do we enable the emerging array of open subject resources to be utilised across boundaries (be they personal, subject, programme, course, institutional or national), in order to challenge sites of power in the University and beyond? These resources enable ways of challenging hegemonic, mental conceptions of the world and framing new social relations. This requires curriculum leadership. These crises require socio-educational leadership.

The production and re-use of artefacts is of secondary importance to the social relationships that are re-defined by us, and the focus on people and values that are in-turn assembled through open education. In overcoming alienation, and in overcoming crisis, open education enables us to critique institutionalised forms of education, and to promote more resilient ways of doing. The challenge is to promote such a critique.