Thoughts with a sleeping baby
Thank you for this precis 🙂 http://www.learnex.dmu.ac.uk/2010/11/04/the-relationships-between-technology-and-open-education-in-the-development-of-a-resilient-higher-education-2/
I am struggling with much of the same. Ten years ago learning technology was a symptomatic moment in educational transformation/transformational education. Still is, though the onslaught seems so much fiercer, now.
A challenge is how to effect transformational education in places where the power of co-option is so effective that the majority are more or less complicit with power.
Is it only gerrymandering to talk about localism or political-geographies of scale? Or, as I think Lenin might have put it: socialism in one country is impossible (subsequently re-written and defeated as precisely that: socialism in one country). If the majority is the apparent western electorate and sunny-destination air-haul aspirant, then I despair. If the majority is the global dispossessed, the excluded, wherever, I wonder if here is now where the struggle is best effected? Maybe? For now, it is the only place that my struggle can be effected 😉
Another problem, is what "transformational" means. Kind of like "innovation" the term is value-laden with tacit criteria that beg to be made explicit. (See, e.g. Avis, J., 2009. Transformation or transformism: Engestrom's version of activity theory? Educational Review, 61(2), pp.151-165.). The word "radical", is similarly problematic.
Getting into the third space, out from the us-and-them but siding squarely for autonomy, justice, democracy and a lot of freedoms (from hunger and fear; to work, learn, move, speak, love and be healthy), I am drawn to the ideas of "public teaching", "public sociology", "social learning spaces", "student-as-producer", and the "communiversity".
Questions include (more or less):
- how does the community access the knowledge-commons: the goods and services of the knowledge economy? How can the knowledge commons be widened and taken by/with/for all?
- what is a viable resource model for a community IT centre? Who funds it and how? Labour cost (voluntarism? employment?)? Capital cost (space, heat, power, Internet, computers, etc)? This requires considering the global picture as well as the immediately local: the silicon, metals and manufacturing of computers is a huge part of the global economy. So is the leccy that drives it.
- how do we measure the success of a community development initiative?
- who benefits from a community IT centre? what is the community?
- how does a community IT centre work with a communiversity/open-education movement? community teaching? peer learning? Oh just forget it, I don't come here to learn, I come here for eBay, Facebook, Flightbookers, Footy and my pics on-line, and what's wrong with that? I don't want all that [epithet here] education stuff.
rWorld2 