Jim Groom writes another excellent piece in his blog, Bavatuesdays. In the post he makes the very important point that edutech poeple need to be aware, constantly aware, of the fact that technology, especially educational technology products like Blackboard, are bound up with corporate interests that are not our own. That technology does not always have the interest of teaching and learning to heart. I would add two things to this.
First, it’s not just corporations and capitalism that we need to be wary of, it’s governments too. Power is power, and educational technology can be the handmaiden of any institution willing to control it. What freaks me out about Blackboard most — and Angel too for that matter — is the way in which they push the assessment angle. In these systems the course becomes a conduit of information from the pedagogic periphery to the administrative core (and not between professor and student, the core relation). At some point, grade books — proffered as a convenience — will eventually frame how courses are taught and students graded, as they morph into devices for projecting standards and guidelines for teaching. The tail wags the dog.
Second, it’s not just Blackboard, but Web 2.0 as well. Facebook, for example, is about generating consumer data. It’s not, at root, about friends. So is Google. They’ve connected the web, but they’ve also helped transform the academic internet into a corporate web. The web is essentially a vast market mechanism which is quickly transforming and replacing the old, currency-based “system of the world” (if it has not done so already. The fact that banks and car makers are collapsing perhaps signifies this shift.) At least Blackboard is a knowable enemy, and therefore manageable to some extent. With Web 2.0, we have entered a matrix of surveillance the likes of which no dystopian novel I have read anticipated, since it is a matrix that we voluntary participate in. The degree of trust that we have given over to the web is amazing.
This is why I think edutech needs to do two things. We need to activate faculty as critics of technology, not simply users. By critic I mean one who understands technology for what it is, a cultural form with cognitive, pedagogical and social consequences, for good and for bad, and not merely a convenience. This is an important dimension of media fluency. And we need to encourage the development of what I call academia’s “indigenous” technologies, the true source of open source. Academia created contributed heavily to the creation of the internet and the web, and we have traditions of digital scholarship and e‑science that provide alteranate frameworks for doing edutech than the Web 2.0 world of tags, life streaming, and network effects. These things are great — I am for them — but they can’t be our refuge from Blackboard.
2 responses to “Tech, People, Capital”
[…] going to happen. Meanwhile, there’s Pastebud, a soon-to-be-launched Web site, which uses Tech, People, Capital — transducer.ontoligent.com 12/18/2008 Tech, People, Capital December 18th, 2008 ontoligent Jim […]
Wow, you hit on so many awesome points here. Let me try and respond to them (but it will be more like yes, yes, yes 🙂 ).
First, I fully agree about the inclusion of the government in the list of institutional power we need to be wary about. And perhaps them most of all, despite the fact that I work within a state run institution, I think they dictate a majority of the lens through which we have to frame a corporate logic of assessment and much of that is due to how interpenetrated corporate lobbyists and the engine of capital that drives our country’s government currently.
Which brings me to your next, insanely powerful point. Namely, that the very mechanism for convenience and ease that an LMS like Bb offers, will ultimately dictate the idea of assessment and the logic of a course—this is extremely important. Systems mold people and habits as much as we design and frame them. The relationship is constitutive, and you articulate this really subtle yet powerful point quite beautifully.
Yet, it’s the Web 2.0 bomb of truth that you nail at the end of the post that hits me really hard, particularly at this very moment. I was recently part of a “hoax” wherein a got a link to a fake student site through a colleague I trusted on Twitter, I blogged about it only to find out this week it was part of a Historical Hoax course project.
Basically a way of demonstrating the fragile nature of trust online, but it’s a point that returns me to the fact that so much of my network is about a human relationship of trust. Without that, I couldn’t manage it, yet at the same time it is mediated and managed through a corporate infrastructure. My extension of trust provides corporate-techno monoliths with so much of my information, and so much power to much shape and change these relationships.
We are at a point that we can actually see this process, we can literally watch the corporate world ingest the academic space for technology. Something that was seemingly necessary given the horrific state of most academic tech innovation, yet you frame a side of it here that truly scares me because I have become a kind of unthinking champion of it. I don’t think I have ever really thought as critically as I should have about this. And I can say the same thing about my thinking about my network of trust until recently. It’s eye-opening (so maybe the history class had a point, although I feel like I was duped—though willingly), and I think, as you say, the broader questions need to extend far behind a known quantity like Bb, and into the privatized incorporation of our information on the web and our identities more generally.
This is an awesome post, and one I have to think more about before I try and think about just what the hell it is I am doing online. Thanka Rafael, awesome stuff.