Photo by issac cortes on Unsplash
Oh dear, so much to write about and so little time. Or maybe things just moving so fast that the moment for blogging passes and another week goes by without me taking time to write. Anyway in an attempt to remedy that situation, this is just a very quick post based on a couple of things I saw last week.
On Friday I saw this tweet from Helen Crump.
That’s a very good question. Also, does open education have politics? #openedSig #cr2518 #oer #oep @IETatOU https://t.co/DgcshJ0BaO
— Helen Crump (@crumphelen) 31 October 2018
Of course ed tech has politics, it’s steeped in them. Everything has a political context. Education isn’t neutral, is highly political and contextual. The right to education maybe enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Rights , however that doesn’t actually set the context of how education is perceived, instantiated, supported and controlled at national and international levels. To think that educational technology is neutral is naive. It too is developed, owned and sold by someone with an agenda, and there is a Political or political motive to that.
Despite the claims by most ed tech vendors, ed tech is not the solution to education. It is a solution but right now in the Global North it exists in a neoliberal context. The cost of education and personalisation is increasingly being driven by biased, highly political, data driven, developments. AI and all those algorithms we are constantly hearing about, are not neutral or non political . They conform to the standards and privileges of those who develop them.
Then I read Maha’s post on the privilege to choose global perspectives. Once again Maha reminding us in the Global North of our assumptions around globalism, diversity, the acceptance of our ‘norms’ in academic writing, presenting and referencing. The political context of academia.
if you are in the US, your career will survive completely even if you never read a single article by someone not from your culture, not in your language.
would a journal accept my article if it had ZERO references by Western canon?
I blog, I tweet, I publish, I f*%$ing invade conferences with Virtual keynotes and presentations and conversations and I join and initiate collaborations and I speak that language and I build those relationships. So you can all *see me* and you can all *hear me*.
That’s hard work. I have such huge respect for Maha and that f*%$ing invasion. It is so needed and welcome (well from most people I know. And yes, that’s my politics coming through). It can be uncomfortable, but education should be uncomfortable at times. It shouldn’t just be about a “personalised journey”, where you are never challenged and you never question of challenge the context of that experience. Higher education shouldn’t just be judged on the kind of money you can earn, the perpetuating of an increasingly fractured and fragile political scenario.
Nearly half of recent graduates were not working in graduate roles in 2017, the Commons education committee says. https://t.co/3uE9aioagv
— James Clay (@jamesclay) 5 November 2018
Then I see the news about teaching holograms and I automatically think of Maha’s post. How this the exact opposite of her invasion. This could be the starting of another f*%$ing huge cultural invasion. Yet again, we (in the Global North) are developing “new” ways to subjugate “global markets” with this great new (?) technology
. . . members will also be offered the hologram system, which Imperial is adopting for its MBA classes, aimed at cutting the cost of sharing their academics while hopefully improving on videoconferencing.
Note the emphasis on improving videoconferencing – not improving/developing pedagogy. That doesn’t get mentioned until much further down in the article. But fear not the holographic teacher can take questions in real time. Which is great, because obviously a great big hologram (of a white, middle aged man- check the article’s lead picture) is much better than say synchronous chat session within a video conferencing session – or you know having live video q & a session, or using some twitter, what’s app or snapchat or any technology that might be actually used by students outside education. And I bet all the planned classes will be in English. Once again we invade the rest of the world except this time we don’t have to face the natives in their own country. We can just beam in star Professors, Darth Vader stylee.
What politics are implicit in that ed tech?
