4. Confluence of forces
Confluence of digitization, marketisation & datafication of HE
While
State funding is being reduced
Student body much more diverse
Inequality is growing
Curriculum transformation (form & content)
5. Marketisation
Exogenous marketisation - HE as a business opportunity
UK universities now competing over a record amount of
competitive revenue, making them some of the biggest businesses
overall
2018 global investment Edtech $4.46 billion
http://funding.hackeducation.com/investments.html)
New forms of market-making (Komljenovic & Robertson 2016)
Higher Education is Big Business 11 / 11/
19 https://wonkhe.com/blogs/higher-
education-is-big-business/?
8. There’s effectively no choice.
You go through every website saying “yes”
because you can’t possibly read 50,000 pages of small print.
But every time you say yes, you are submitting to a system which makes
you manifestly unfree,
it steals data from you every second of your life
Zadie Smith 2019
..our mind and psychic life have become the main raw material which digital
capitalism aims at capturing and commodifying
Achille Mbembe 2019
A new economic logic to predict and modify human behaviour as a means to
produce revenue and market control
Zuboff 2015
9. Surveillance capitalism in education
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ps13-billion-turnitin-sale-spotlights-intellectual-property-fears
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/how-colleges-find-their-students/522516/
Capturing & owning
students’ work & selling it
back to universities
Tracking prospective
students on college
websites and targeted
personalized engagement
18. Resisting market capture
The South African White
Paper for Post-School
Education and Training
… set out a vision of a
transformed system which will
enrich the economic, social
and cultural lives of South
Africa's people, promote
social justice and overcome
historical inequities.
DHET 2013
South African National Plan
for Post-school Education and
training: 2019-2030
….transformation, equity, and
redress underpin the
implementation of strategies
in the Plan
DHET 2019
19. Individual resistance
HowWhy
Privacy
Ultra targeted ads
Filter bubble
Aggregation of
data concentrates
power, enables
serious social
damage
Use alternatives
Stop verbing the
product
Break the
superconnections
See
https://small-tech.org
and
https://www.timschwartz.org
20. Critical scholarship
Harder as HE
becomes a gig sector
Research: interrogating the “new
normal”
Komljenovic, Naidoo, Oliver, Robertson, Selwyn,
Williamson etc
Thanks Shanali Govender 2019
22. Robust research
based on scholarly expertise
framed by research ethics protocols
quality controlled by peer review
resourced by impartial funders
All kinds of research needed
I think people in this country have
had enough of experts
Michael Gove 2016
25. A research agenda
Edtech policy / ecosystems
Learning theory and machine learning
Politics & economics of edtech
Theorising ethics in edtech and AI
The coloniality of edtech
Digital & data literacies
Epistemology, curriculum and edtech
Old & new forms of digital inequalities
Open education, the Commons & alternative imaginaries
AdaptedfromNewresearchproblemsandagendasinlearning,mediaand
technology:theeditors’wishlistLearningMediaandtechnology44:2
WilliamsonB:Potter,J;Enyon,R(2019)
27. The rules of the game for
platform companies and
new economic models
being hammered out now
will set important
precedents for HE
28. Technological systems and relationships always embedded in the social
political systems from which they emerge
Jackson 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmro5vZcFTA8March2019
29. Regulations to ameliorate harm
In California chatbots have to
clearly identify as artificial i.e. a
software programme – rather
than a human
Three US cities have banned
the use of facial recognition
software
(Current chatbot market $2,6 billion)
33. Narratives of the future
https://www.digitalasiahub.org/download/drones-dreams-a-speculative-sprint-story-collection/#,https://knowledgemaze.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/speculative-
data-futures-karima/,https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/twelve-tomorrows
34. Imagining the future
The future cannot be
predicted
Futures studies
Possible probable and preferred futures
Anticipation studies
The future is unknowable
37. Some references
Ball, S & Youdell 2008 Hidden Privatisation in Public Education Education International https://www.right-to-
education.org/resource/hidden-privatisation-public-education
Dundas, D (2019) Zadie Smith on fighting the algorithm: ‘If you are under 30, and you are able to think for yourself right now,
God bless you’ 8 November https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2019/11/08/zadie-smith-on-fighting-the-algorithm-
if-you-are-under-30-and-you-are-able-to-think-for-yourself-right-now-god-bless-you.html
Komljenovic J & Robertson S (2016) The dynamics of ‘market-making’ in higher education, Journal of Education
Policy, Volume 31, 2016 - Issue 5
le Guin (2002) Ursula le Guin and the Importance of Imagination, Talk given at a meeting of Oregon Literary Arts in 2002
, https://dewdropped.com/2019/09/27/ursula-le-guin-and-the-importance-of-imagination/
Mbembe, A (2019) Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe https://www.newframe.com/thoughts-on-
the-planetary-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/ 5 Sep 2019
Zuboff, S (2015)“Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization.” Journal of Information
Technology 30.1 (2015): 75-89.
Zuboff , S (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Profile Books,
Hinweis der Redaktion
Do you remember this report, which came out in 2013, 6 years ago? What effect did it have on your life? What a powerful image- technology as an avalanche…that is an image of something that overwhelms and crushes people. As with an avalanche, humanity is at the mercy of the technical.
It is a metaphor that is widespread. Technology as inevitable, Technology as causes of social change.
There are a huge number of ed tech providers providing unbundled services across the student life cycle
This is 2017, much more now ( a map of OPMs in 2019 had 60 companies) , numbers are exploding
The platform economy gives rise to the platform university
This seminal book explains the economic logic.
Data is being monetised through collecting and connecting every swipe, like, click , tap online
Mbembe Information and data being systemically weaponised against citizens and democratic processes
It is both personal and systemic
It can also of course be exploited for political purposes
adds up…..
Weaponising data to subvert democracy systemic 1984 Orwellian (quote from Zuboff) fundamental manipulation, relations
Surveillance
Shaping word view
Controlling behaviour
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2019/11/08/zadie-smith-on-fighting-the-algorithm-if-you-are-under-30-and-you-are-able-to-think-for-yourself-right-now-god-bless-you.html
https://www.9news.com.au/national/politics-facial-recognition-in-schools-technology/c67bdfa8-372c-4f9f-9276-9b3bc847d163
Page credit: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/01/11/506361845/the-higher-ed-learning-revolution-tracking-each-students-every-move
Data about students collected for modification, and for monetisation
What if one genuinely believes in SDG 4? What about ducation as a public good, for public benefit? Education where the benefits are spread across society in terms of employment, economic prosperity, health and social cohesion.
Hard to imagine but smoking was ubiquitous- in restaurants, halls, planes, hopsitals….
Change is possible
It is possible to challenge of emerging toxicities and cancerous elements of our times
Tech companies are the new tobacco companies
Next generations will look back at us now in astonishment
It is possible to build a counternarrative
There are opportunities for engagement at each level of the system – macro, meso and micro
Want to suggest what is possible and also to amplify what is already happening
Resistance is about agency and taking control
It is NOT about opting out of a digital world
It is not about opting out of a market ecosystem a purely state controlled system has not proven successful either)
It is about refusal to surrender at both the personal and the societal levels
The Indian government made a difficult choice when it banned Facebook Freebasics offering which would have provided zero rating for FB and access to the mobile Internet. It made the choice for net neutrality, and recent events (with Trump and Brexit for eg) have proved them right
There are still national systems that have not fully succumbed to market promises.
South African national policies remain premises on equity and social justice.
Why? In order to make mass surveillance less profitable
To break out of the filter bubble, it is bad for the discomfort of learning, for the exposure to multiple world views
To make the beautifully targeted advertising less seductive
Perhaps worst of all, the real issue is the aggregation of these data points and the concentrated power that this enables for lies and manipulation to really dark ends
http://unboundeq.creativitycourse.org/an emergent, collaborative curriculum which aims to create equity-focused, open, connected, intercultural learning experiences across classes, countries and contexts. (Egypt, Ireland, US faciliators)
It is happening but it is getting harder (because of the precariat)
There are many quick and glib opinions. It is really important to admit that we don’t know
In an age where anti intellectualism is widespread, robust research needs to be reclaimed.
The focus has been on technical and scientific skills, but as the world changes, there is an urgent need for social scientists to analyse and make sense of what is happening,
The research agenda is changing, here are some suggestions
Mention regulation and eyes glaze over. But if we understand regulation as the allocation of values and resources, then it is really important to regulate/
A platform company creates value by facilitating exchanges between consumers and producers.
Political scientists are doing important work explaining the ways that these new models are contextualised
Implications for student learning, sense of belonging in an institution, and the pedagogy of care
https://www.360quadrants.com/
Recent guidelines emphasise the need to get a move on – and some universities have started to do so…the universities of Leeds and Auckland being recent examples. Interestingly Auckland specifies that data used to specifiy action at an individual level will always be accompanied by personal intervention by university staff.
Ursula le Guin, said that
Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. possesses
These examples, from Digital Asia, the Access to Knowledge Initiative based in Cairo, and MIT, all using narratives and fiction to imagine different kinds of futures.
There are numerous innovations exploring new forms of delivery for access and inclusion, based on open licences and leveraging commons based social innovation approaches, as can be seen in these examples