As far as education today goes, it seems uncontroversial to assert that ed-tech companies tend to suffer from bouts of what one might call a messiah complex. Looking past this apparent attempt to “innovate” the educational establishment by “sparing” educators from their late-night grading binges, it isn’t hard to discern a more self-absorbed, profiteering agenda at work. Framing this conversation well, John Warner picks apart the efficiency-happy spiels of ed-tech startups, like Knewton and Amplify, by focusing on the human dimension of education:

The driving values of all of these teaching machines is “efficiency”, but it is difficult to reconcile the value of “efficiency” with learning. Education is an ongoing process, not a product, and what we learn as we stumble off the path is often more valuable than when we are toeing the line. Do we value “efficiency” in our relationships with our families? Is our most profound love “efficient”?

Empowering students to assume an active and earnest role in their continued education does not, in other words, come easy. There are no circuitous work-arounds when it comes to engaging learners who are as diverse and multifaceted as ever before. So when companies wave around their magic wands, tout their one-size-fits-all solutions, and co-opt progressive educational phrases like “personalized learning,” it should be cause for concern. Accordingly, we should be critical when faced eye-to-eye with shortcuts that purportedly make our job as educators easier and more efficient. More often than not, that is to say, educational “miracles” come at a serious cost — a cost that students will have to pay, never really having a choice in the matter to begin with.

What is more, look to Jim Groom’s skepticism regarding the self-proclaimed advent that is the “Next Generation” of Learning Management Systems, Blackboard 8, which only seems to echo the technocratic rhetoric of so many proprietary tools before it. Confident in its sole capacity to “enhance critical thinking skills” and “improve classroom performance,” this new edition of Blackboard goes so far as to tacitly step into the shoes of tomorrow’s new and improved educator. Such is the anthropomorphic rhetoric of propriety ed-tech, in which for-profit tools and resources advertise themselves as effective substitutes for the engaged efforts of embodied educators. To the contrary, Groom notes,

These things are not done by technology, but rather people thinking and working together. Our technology may afford a unique possibility in this endeavor by bringing disparate individuals together in an otherwise untenable community, yet it doesn’t enhance critical thinking or improve classroom performance, we do that, together.

Groom goes on to emphasize this point, blasting Blackboard for its attempt to “commodify the labor of others” under its own name, in turn bolstering “the idea that educational technology ‘is about the technology,’ ” which, of course, it is not. Looking closely, we can see this trend present in several of our readings for this week. The landing page for Turnitin‘s website yields a good example. Upon entering the site, we’re met with a presumptuous slogan — “Education with Integrity” — in conjunction with a tech-centered graphic in which students are dwarfed by a giant computer whose monitor displays Turnitin’s implied interface.

The combined rhetorical effect of this page is complex and problematic and kind of bizarre. First up is the slogan, which seems to imply that education without a subscription to Turnitin is one that lacks integrity, as if to say the relationship between teachers and learners is not the bedrock of academic honesty. The centeredness of the floating monitor — with Turnitin’s various features swarmed by seemingly excited (and faceless) learners — only works to reiterate this message: even in the visual absence of a human educator, technology still manages to educate, to edify and to impassion. Hey, apparently, it can even motivate students to reinvent the pulley system! Ultimately, the rhetoric of this landing page is so idealized as to beckon toward some bizarre techno-utopian future where students passionately gather round technology as their much sought-after savior. Meanwhile, in my experience, students scowl at the mere mention of Turnitin. Why? Because Turnitin forges an air of distrust and doubt among students and teachers, making learners feel like they’re bugs under some sort of plagiaristic microscope. In any case, the problems here are so loud that they speak for themselves.

In looking for recourse among our readings for this week, I found myself returning to Jesse Stommel’s call to mean what we say as educators, and to build substance into our promises as teachers. Or, as he writes:

When we use a word like “open,” or ones like “agency” and “identity”, these should not be just empty signifiers. We should be transparent, and even partisan, in our politics. Especially as educators. But we need not proselytize.

For far too many corporate entities, these words do become empty signifiers, not unlike a form of sophistic rhetoric aimed at exploiting students, teachers, and administrators for the sake of an extra buck. That said, the best we can do in response is to act in good faith and in the genuine interest of our students, not only as learners but also as human beings. To always recognize their humanity during this process is a continued act of affirmation — and to settle for anything less is to do a disservice to a world of people who deserve so much more.

With these thoughts in mind, I ask us to consider the following two questions:

Here’s an ad that’s referenced in one of this week’s readings.

https://ispot.tv/a/7Ycj 

Pursuant to the prior week’s theme of CONTEXT it’s important to establish context for this week’s framework — THEORY — in regard to the critical pedagogues, such as Paolo Freire and bell hooks, who we’re reading. Freire wrote and tirelessly advocated for “the oppressed” and toward pedagogies for the oppressed and for freedom in colonized Brazil. I’d describe Freire as a META-theorist. Here are screen shots from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource) about Brazil’s history and Freire’s early career:

The first time I read Freire was three years ago for ITP Core I at the GC (now called Digital Pedagogy I) as a non-matriculated student. I approached it with the openness that often accompanies auditing a course and I found him a bit hard to follow. This time, having obtained the ITP Certificate and two years in to the MA in DH at the GC, and also teaching Eng 101 and 201 at BMCC, I “get” him. I can now relate to Freire’s observation that “education is suffering from narration sickness.” (p. 71, Pedagogy of the Oppressed) This sentence from the opening paragraph of Chapter 2 continues as Freire further observes that “education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor” (p. 72) thereby laying out his “‘banking’ concept of education” or what has come to be called the “banking model” of education.

Not wanting to suffer from ‘narration sickness’ nor embody the ‘banking model’ myself as I teach, I’m very interested in performative knowledge and I effort toward collaborating with my students wherever and whenever possible. For example, at BMCC the Eng 101 syllabus is a template written for instructors that we must use (a characteristic of the “banking model”) AND the content of the final exam and the instructions for administering the exam are “given”, i.e., dictated to us instructors (def. “banking model”!) So, I “humanized” these two aspects of my teaching by bringing in a guest speaker/colleague to talk with my Eng 101 class about the content of the final exam, which engaged my students in astonishing ways and which my colleague truly enjoyed. In Eng 201, we may write our own syllabus and we’re not required to give an in-class final exam. Therefore, I’ve decided to have the final exam be a final paper that my 201 students and I create together so that we can use the time to focus on their individual writing styles in their interest areas (in consultation with me).

While I’m not sure what I’m practicing in the classroom would be defined by purists as “critical pedagogy”, I aspire to it as “the antithesis to the banking model of education” (p. 24 Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, The Art of Critical Pedagogy) in my own practice of pedagogy. While my teaching may not yet rise to the level of “reading the word and world” (p. 27, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, citing Freire & Macedo) I’m committed to praxis, “problem-posing education”, and “learning for freedom rather than learning to earn” because “a humanizing education that develops a critical literacy for students and teachers” (p. 27) is, in my opinion, the only way to go in our current culture. Furthermore, bell hooks’s “critical challenge” ethos is vital to this. In the Introduction to Teaching to Transgress, hooks talks about Freire’s great influence on her: “When I discovered the work of Brazilian thinker Paolo Freire, my first introduction to critical pedagogy, I found a mentor and a guide, someone who understood that learning could be liberatory.” (p. 6) While hooks admittedly adopts Freire’s “pedagogical paradigms” she also challenges his ideas. Therefore, it might be worth noting Friere’s influences in order to grasp an even broader context for hooks’s critique of Freire:

hooks also notes about her own trajectory: “Already deeply engaged with feminist thinking, I had no difficulty bringing that critique to Freire’s work.” (p. 6, Teaching to Transgress)

As my own particular academic interests and areas of scholarly inquiry include cultural studies, an area of overlap with the critical pedagogues such as Freire and hooks, I ask us all to consider:

What types of interactive assignments or supplements to course content might we develop and implement or are already using?

What is your critical pedagogy “dream” assigned work or in-class activity…?     

 

I’m not really ready to post my response to this week’s readings, since I’m still processing a lot of new information and perspectives. And I’ve not yet finished reading The Innovative University, partly because I find it’s commercial premise so distressing. But, since I’m running out of time to post this by monday morning…. I’ll try to pin down and extract some of my swirling thoughts. And consider our readings in terms of temporal, spatial, and other categories of contexts.

TIME

A number of the readings were self-reflective about Ed. Tech.’s limited self-reflectiveness about its history. This seems to be partly a function of its interdisciplinarity, and the fact that ed. tech is often a secondary, instrumental, discipline for academics engaged in it, and partly a function of a continued sense of novelty, of always being on the verge. [*edit: this explicit in Weller]. I found Watters (on Teaching Machines) and Fletcher to be particularly helpful for contextualizing ed. tech. within the history of developments in visual technology in the 20th century, and Weller and Downes for zooming in to late-20th – 21st century web technology.
This pull-quote from Watters links to our Week 1 topic of “Definitions”:

“It’s difficult to pinpoint “the first” teaching machine. It depends, of course, on how you define such a thing.”

More generally, I appreciate how the authors are attentive to context, and self-reflective about their sensitivities. Thus, Watters description of her planned book: “Teaching Machines, under contract with MIT Press, chronicles the history of this century-old belief that the automation of education is necessary (and is surely coming any day now)”, and the fact that she maintains a blog about it. At the same time, she is efficient about using visual clues and tech conventions to supply context. A snapshot of the timeline illustrates:

SPACE

My impression is that our readings are primarily focused on the U.S. (though this might be a misimpression, reflecting my own inattention).
Some of the readings touch upon primary and secondary education, but most are about the university, and a bit about possible substitutes or supplements to the conventional US university.
I found Fletcher and McMillan Cottom particularly useful for spatial contextualization, partly figuratively, in their discussion of ecosystems and platforms.
My attempt to think about spatial context is invariably intertwined with the sociology of space, and so, to….

CULTURE

CLASS & ECONOMICS
McMillan Cottom’s grappling with demographic realities and pragmatism is encouraging for thinking about adaptation of pedagogy to the real world. ( As above, I am finding Skim Christensen and Eyring depressing and distressing).
I appreciate that many of the readings push back against technological utopianism.
Number 31 in Watters’ list of debacles resonates very strongly for me, The Gentrification of Sesame Street. Because the blend of good and bad, the co-opting of good for bad, can be so subtle sometimes, so challenging. As Wellers says of social media, “What we are now wrestling with is the paradox of social media: the fact that its negatives and its positives exist simultaneously.”

ETHICS
Privacy, metrics, open-source, again the class & economics issues….

RHETORIC
a couple of random observations:
I was a bit put off at first by some of Watters’ anger:

“I decided to do something similar: chronicle for you a decade of ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas.

Oh yes, I’m sure you can come up with some rousing successes and some triumphant moments that made you thrilled about the 2010s and that give you hope for “the future of education.” Good for you. But that’s not my job. (And honestly, it’s probably not your job either.)”

I wrote in my notes:
I’m not sure what she’s getting at with “job”, but why not?  Why does everything need to be polemic? I’m all for ditching the alleged objectivity and neutrality of “modern science” including tech, or for seeking fairness in “balance”, but I think that a positive aspect of post-modernism is to permit and enable critical thinkers to move beyond being “for or against”; more precisely, to stand aside from argumentation, to give fair representative well-rounded reports and evaluations as a basis for impassioned advocacy.
But i think i welcome the voice of Cassandra alongside some of the more neutral voices we read.
Part of what disturbs me about Christensen and Eyring is what feels to me to be reductive pandering to our metrics-based society; Harvard as the benchmark; Hermann Hesse summarized as “Nobel Laureate”.

CONNECTIVISM

One of the challenges raised for me in this week’s readings is the value of non-obvious contextualization. This reminded me of a reading from last semester’s Intro to DH course, Stephen Ramsay’s The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books.