Fostering a Free Relationship to Technology (and to Open)
Billy Meinke-Lau
@billymeinke
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa | #OER19
NIU Galway | April 11, 2019
Outline
My background
Futures and the Manoa School
(Dator 2009)
Research Interests
Examining power structures that enable or hinder collaboration
Examining intellectual property law and policy that promote self-determination
Cultivating a free relationship to technology, and to openness
WTF IS OPEN
What are we actually doing here
Open as a Means or an End?
“Access to higher education should be accessible to all”
SDG 4.3 Equal access to technical/vocational & higher education
“Open” to serve all people
“We envision a world where everyone, everywhere has access to the high quality education and training they desire; where education is seen as an essential, shared, and collaborative social good.” (source)
“The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.” (source)
“We are committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience.” (source)
Social Justice
“A transformative response would also ensure that students and educators have a stable power supply, adequate access to functional computing devices and affordable and stable connectivity (in rural environments in particular); government funding for OER creation, adaptation and dissemination; and a mechanism for acceptance of OER or MOOCs as micro-credentials to lower the cost of formal education.”
(Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl Ann, and Henry Trotter 2018)
Open Practices
“...it is imperative to move beyond open-closed dichotomies and even unified conceptions of openness. We contend that expansive conceptualisations of OEP acknowledge the complex, actual and situated practices of teaching and learning – where context influences the choice and use of OEP, where OEP may emerge before the use of OER, and where critical approaches to open education may be realised.”
(Cronin, Catherine, and Iain MacLaren 2018)
Barriers to Open
Law: “...threatens sanctions ex post if those orders are not obeyed.”
Social Norms: Regulated through a community.
Market: “...regulat[ion] through the device of price.”
Architecture: “These features of the world—whether made, or found—restrict and enable in a way that directs or affects behavior.”
Lessig, Lawrence. 1998. “The New Chicago School.”
Attributes of Openness
Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, University of Cape Town, and University of Cape Town Eve Gray. 2009.
The Multiplicity of “Open”
Openwashing: n., having an appearance of open-source and open-licensing for marketing purposes, while continuing proprietary practices. (A. Watters)
“The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles.” (R. Stallman)
“However, there is one significant way in which MOOCs through Coursera are not fully open. Coursera owns the rights to the materials, so they cannot be repurposed or reused without permission, and the material may be removed from the Coursera site when the course ends.” (T. Bates)
The Complexity of Stewarding Open
Technology Futures
Of the past
What’s your Philosophy of Technology?
Designed open source to democratize or privately to centralize?
Who controls the pipes and roadways of information?
Are we only thinking about technology technologically?
Both Instrumental and Anthropological
“Through bringing-forth, the growing things of nature as well as whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance.”
(Heidegger 1954)
Not Neutral
“The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology...But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.”
(Heidegger 1954)
Form into Matter
“Form and matter, if they still exist, are at the same level and belong to the same system; there is continuity between the technical and the natural.”
(Simondon 1958)
Our Use Determines Our Relationship to it
Major Technics
Minor Technics
A relationship to technology that is mediated by both the major and minor technics -- anything less would “...maintain an inadequate relation between human reality and technical reality.”
(Simondon 1934)
A Complex Relationship to Technology
“To keep time was once a peculiar attribute of music: it gave industrial value to the the workshop or song or tattoo or the chantey of the sailors tugging at a rope. But the effect of the mechanical clock is more pervasive and strict: it presides over the day from the hour of rising to the hour of rest.”
(Mumford 1934)
Techno-Capitalism
“Capitalism utilized the machine, not to further social welfare, but to increase private profit: mechanical instruments were used for the aggrandizement of the ruling classes...It was because of certain traits in private capitalism that the machine -- which was a neutral agent -- has often seemed, and in fact has sometimes been, a malicious element in society, careless of human life, indifferent to human interests.”
(Mumford 1934)
Contemporary Interplay of Tech and Policy
Tech Dystopias
Coming to a theatre near you
Today’s technology is quite different. Really, it is.
Rules of the Future of Technology
“The fourth, and final rule I would suggest is that technology is not ethically or politically neutral. This has become increasingly evident through the use of social media for political purposes, the misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica and the manner in which AI algorithms reinforce the gender or racial bias in much of society. The prediction here then is that awareness of this will continue to grow, with educators and learners viewing technology use in education as a political choice (whether to partake in data capitalism for instance) as an educational one.”
(Weller 2019)
Technology reinforcing biases
“Search results reflect the values and norms of the search company’s commercial partners and advertisers and often reflect our lowest and most demeaning beliefs, because these ideas circulate so freely and so often that they are normalized and extremely profitable.”
Safiya Noble
Technology is Political, Always
“What’s clear is that the power and dominance of the Silicon Valley – Google and Facebook and a small handful of others – are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.”
Carole Cadwalladr
Technology Choices shaping students, the future
To Close
For now, not for good
Philosophies
What’s your philosophy of technology?
What’s your philosophy of open? (pragmatists and makers)
How much of your philosophy of technology is influenced by your philosophy of open? Or vise versa
Learning to Question “Open”
“The open education community is critical within itself, but not of itself.”
(Rolfe, 2016)
Possible futures
“Futures can open our eyes to how we colonize the future with assumptions about linearity and inevitability and help us decolonize the future by opening up alternatives.”
(Debora Halbert, 2018)
“The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.” (Heidegger)
Do more (or do different) to maintain a free relationship to Open.
Cited Works
Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, University of Cape Town, and University of Cape Town Eve Gray. 2009. “Degrees of Openness: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town.” Peer-Reviewed Article. International Journal of Education and Development Using ICT, Vol. 5, No. 5, 2009. October 24, 2009. http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu/viewarticle.php?id=864.
Cronin, Catherine, and Iain MacLaren. 2018. “Conceptualising OEP: A Review of Theoretical and Empirical Literature in Open Educational Practices.” Open Praxis 10 (2): 127–43. https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.10.2.825.
Dator, James Allen. 2009. Alternative Futures at the Manoa School. 14J. Of Futures Studies 1, 2 (2009).
Halbert, Debora. 2018. “Intellectual Property in the Year 2055.” The Law Review of the Franklin Pierce Center for Intellectual Property 59 (1): 117–35.
Lessig, Lawrence. 1998. “The New Chicago School.” The Journal of Legal Studies 27 (S2): 661–91. https://doi.org/10.1086/468039.
Cited Works (continued)
Heidegger, M. 1954. The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Harper & Row.
Mumford, L. 1934. Technics and Civilization. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
Park, SeongWon. 2013. “Exploring the Possibility of East Asian Futures Studies: Reinterpreting Dator through Zhuangzi * Journal of Futures Studies.” Journal of Futures Studies 2. https://jfsdigital.org/articles-and-essays/2013-2/18-2/article/exploring-the-possibility-of-east-asian-futures-studies-reinterpreting-dator-through-zhuangzi/.
Rolfe, Vivian. 2016. “#Opened16 Conference Presentation.” Education. https://www.slideshare.net/viv_rolfe/opened16-conference-presentation.
Simondon, G. 1958. On the mode of existence of technical objects. (C. Malaspina and J. Rogov, Trans.) Paris: Aubier.
Weller, Martin. 2019. “Learning the Rules of Predicting the Future – The Ed Techie.” The Ed Techie (blog). March 15, 2019. http://blog.edtechie.net/higher-ed/learning-the-rules-of-predicting-the-future/.