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December 13, 2019

Gettin’ Air - The Open Pedagogy Podcast

It was fun listening to podcast with Terry Greene live on VoicEdCanada: Gettin’ Air - The Open Pedagogy Podcast. Here's the link to this episode:


(And also at Soundcloud.)

During our discussion I talked about different resources and sites and stuff, so I tweeted them during the live broadcast. Getting to listen like that was perfect way to remind myself of the stuff I needed to tweet. :-)

November 5, 2019

Aesop HackEd: Nasruddin's Three Lectures

When I was thinking about stories to do for #AesopHackEd, I started thinking of all the Nasruddin stories that are relevant to education. And then... I started obsessing about Nasruddin in general. Since that all happened on November 2, I decided to take it as a sign: I am doing a #NaNoWriMo "novel" about Nasruddin, Birbal, and other wise guys of the Middle East and India. You can see how that is going here: A Book of Nasruddin and Birbal Stories.

Meanwhile, here is one of the stories that is relevant to education. Nasruddin discovers peeragogy!  I was inspired by a version of the story as told by Idries Shah in The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, which is one of four Nasruddin books that he wrote. You can find all of Shah's books free to read online at the Idries Shah Foundation website. I first read Shah's book The Sufis 30 years ago, and I have been learning from Nasruddin ever since. 

Be warned: Nasruddin stories can be highly addictive.

And for more Aesop Hacked, visit Twitter or our planning document, plus you can browse this blog: my stories so far.




NASRUDDIN'S THREE LECTURES

When Mullah Nasruddin moved to a new town, the people of the town were eager to learn from him. "O Wise One," they said to him, "please speak to us of your wisdom and experience."

"I will present a lecture exactly one week from today at noon," agreed Nasruddin.

The next week at noon, the town square was packed with people who wanted to hear what Nasruddin would say.

"Good people," Nasruddin began. "I must ask if you know anything about the topic I will speak about today."

"No, we do not!" shouted the people.

"Well then," said Nasruddin, "there is no point in addressing people who are so ignorant." And the Mullah went home without so much as another word.

The next day, a delegation came to Nasruddin's house. "Please, O Learned One, we ask that you give us another chance. Will you not give a talk to the people of the town so that we may learn from your wisdom and experience?"

"Well," said Nasruddin reluctantly. "I suppose so. I will present a lecture exactly one week from today at noon."

This time the people were ready. Just as before, Nasruddin asked, "Good people, I must ask if you know anything about the topic I will speak about today."

The people shouted back, "Yes, we do!"

"Well then," said Nasruddin, "if you are already informed, there is no need for my lecture." And once again the Mullah went home without so much as another word.

The people were now even more eager to hear what he had to say, so they pleaded with him to give one more lecture, and Nasruddin agreed. "I will give one last lecture a week from today at noon."

This time the people arrived, even more eager than before but uncertain what would happen. Once again, Nasruddin asked, "Good people, I must ask if you know anything about the topic I will speak about today."

Some people shouted, "Yes!"

Some people shouted, "No!"

"Well then," said Nasruddin, "those who know should instruct those who do not. You have no need of me!"

That was the last of Nasruddin's lectures.



November 2, 2019

Be Careful How You Count: A Tortoise Tale from Cameroon

This is for a new storytelling project by modern-day Aesops in the field of education; more information about that here. Maybe you will want to contribute a story! Find us at Twitter, #AesopHackEd, and I will be using the label AesopHackEd here at this blog when I add more stories. And yes, there will be more stories! I think this sounds like a very fun and useful project. :-)

My story is a parable about the dangers of number-crunching out of context.


Be Careful How You Count:
A Tortoise Tale from Cameroon

Tortoise was hungry. He was always hungry. He lived with his mother. Tortoise would bring food to their house. His mother would cook the food, and Tortoise would eat the food, and then his mother would eat the food that was left. Tortoise was always hungry, and his mother was always hungry too. 

African Spurred Tortoise

One day Tortoise went and fetched home seven baskets of greens. "Cook the greens, Mother!" said Tortoise. "And hurry up please! I am hungry. I am VERY hungry."

liponda greens in bowl

Mother Tortoise hustled and bustled and soon she brought the cooked greens out from the kitchen. There were now three baskets of greens, and she put them on the table where Tortoise was waiting. 

Tortoise shouted, "Where are the rest of them?" Tortoise then pounded his fist on the table. "I brought home seven baskets of greens. And I told you I was hungry! Bring me the other greens. NOW!"

"What other greens are you talking about, silly boy?" said Mother Tortoise.

Tortoise knew that his mother must have eaten the other four baskets of greens, and that made him angry. They argued back and forth and back and forth until Tortoise finally got so angry that he picked up a stone, hit her on the head, and killed her.

stone

Tortoise then ate the three baskets of greens, and he was still hungry afterwards. "At least she won't be stealing my food any more," he thought to himself. 

The next day Tortoise went and brought home another seven baskets of greens. There was no more mother to cook for him, so Tortoise had to cook the greens himself. He put the seven baskets of greens in the pot, and when they were ready he took them out. 

There were three baskets of greens. 

So Tortoise began to yell at the pot. "You greedy pot!" he shouted. "How dare you eat my greens?"

But then Tortoise thought some more, and he understood what had happened. He had killed his mother for nothing. 

This made Tortoise feel so bad that he picked up the same stone, hit himself on the head, and died. 

The moral of the story: Not all baskets are the same. Be careful how you count.

~ ~ ~

This story is my retelling of a folktale from Cameroon as found in this book: Tortoise the Trickster and Other Folktales from Cameroon by Loreto Todd, published in 1979.

I added the part about Tortoise getting angry at the pot; the rest of the story is the same as the version in Todd's book, retold in my own words. Here is the moral of the story in the book: "That is why Tortoise died, because he had forgotten that a mother cannot steal from her own child." For my moral, I wanted to make the connection to the dangers of number-crunching in education, especially when people take the data out of context.

About Cameroon: Cameroon is located on the west coast of central Africa; it is sometimes classified as a central African nation, and sometimes as west Africa. You can learn more at Wikipedia.

About Tricksters. The name "trickster" emphasizes intelligence, but tricksters are also notable for being greedy, selfish, and cruel, as you can see in this story.

About Tortoise: There are stories about tortoise the trickster in many African cultures, and enslaved African storytellers brought those stories with them to the United States, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. If you would like to read some African American stories about the trickster turtle, you can find a selection here: African American turtle stories.

About Loreto Todd: Loreto Todd (born in 1942) is a linguist specializing in English pidgins and creoles. You can read more about her work here: Loreto Todd. She collected the stories told in Cameroonian Pidgin English, and then presented them in standard English in this book. It is a wonderful collection of folktales; highly recommended! It's out of print, but there are used copies at ABE and at Amazon


book cover of Tortoise the Trickster and Other Folktales from Cameroon by Loreto Todd

October 31, 2019

Connect and share with #ungradingnet

I had a few minutes this morning, so I thought I would set up a few more tools to curate and syndicate ungrading ideas and resources by using the #ungradingnet hashtag and RSS to pull content together (see previous post for a Twitter widget tracking #ungradingnet). I hope this can be useful as Ken sets up ungrading.net as a hub for us to share and connect. :-)

As people may know, I am a huge fan of Inoreader as a tool both for reading RSS and also for syndicating that RSS back out. I've set up a tag in my Inoreader to collect ungradingnet content and send that back out via RSS and also via HTML. The HTML is at the bottom of this post (plus the HTML iframe for anyone who is interested), and here's the RSS feed:

BLOGS. I can use Inoreader to follow people's blogs if you are using ungradingnet as a label (tag, category, it's all good), so this blog post, for example, will show up automatically there. If you will be using ungradingnet at your blog, let me know and I will subscribe!

DIIGO. Diigo also offers support for RSS and thanks to a nifty trick I learned from Tom Woodward (or Alan Levine? I can't remember who for sure!), I have now subscribed to all public Diigo items tagged ungradingnet; here's that URL if you are curious how that works:
https://www.diigo.com/tag/ungradingnet?tab=153
(This is actually my first test of subscribing to the all-users RSS feed with that tab=153 trick, and if that doesn't work, I'll subscribe to individual Diigo users, just like with blogs; I know those RSS feeds work since I use those all the time for my own Diigo content.)

PINBOARD. Update: With some help again from Tom Woodward, I've added a live RSS feed of Pinboard items tagged ungradingnet also!
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/t:ungradingnet/

I know this will be useful just for me in terms of organizing my ungrading stuff (which is, admittedly, a mess, spread out everywhere)... and I hope it can be useful to others. If you will be blogging about ungrading and using ungradingnet as a label, let me know! :-)






<iframe frameborder="0" height="1300" src="https://www.inoreader.com/stream/user/1005987531/tag/ungradingnet/view/html?cs=m&amp;n=5" tabindex="-1" width="100%"></iframe>

October 30, 2019

UnGrading.net

It looks like people might be using Ungrading.net as a hub for sharing ungrading strategies and resources, so I went ahead and quickly made a Twitter hashtag widget for #ungradingnet using Martin Hawksey's wonderful TAGS widget tool. The widget is below, and here's the Archive and the Explorer. I've pasted in the iframe code for anyone who wants to use it below also.





<iframe style="border:0; width:100%;max-width:500px;height:500px" src="https://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/widget/?q=SELECT%20B%2C%20A%2C%20C%2C%20E%2C%20COUNT(A)%20WHERE%20NOT(C%20starts%20with%20'RT%20')%20GROUP%20BY%20B%2C%20A%2C%20C%2C%20E%20ORDER%20BY%20E%20DESC%20LIMIT%2010&d=13ot9E-HAPFzfCZu3TujNwy2R57bc8vXsmXyFZJnUsls&sheet=Archive&theme=light&linkColor=%231c94e0&widgetHeight=500&excludeTracking=false&excludeThread=false&includeRT=false&includeMedia=true" ></iframe>


October 27, 2019

Zuboff, Chapter 7: Reality Business / School Business

Yep, it's been a month (ugh, not a great month), but I realized during the Can*Innovate conference last week (I presented on randomizers... UN-prediction!) that I need to get back to work on summarizing Zuboff. I know that most people are not going to read her book, but maybe they will read these notes and think more critically about not just the LMS but the way Learning Analytics is now driving the LMS. This week's chapter from Zuboff addresses that directly, too, since this is the chapter where she begins the discussion about behavior modification.

The fact that behaviorist assumptions run deep in education is a big reason why, I suspect, many people uncritically accept the claims of learning analytics and the behavior modification agenda that goes with them. For teachers who approach education as a behavior modification project, then learning analytics are just what they need. But for teachers who approach education with a belief in human freedom, we need to be aware of how the LMS constrains our students' freedom, and our freedom as teachers too.

And let there be no mistake about it: right now the emphasis is on learning analytics to monitor and control students, but that is just the beginning; there will be teaching analytics also to monitor and control teachers. So keep those thoughts in mind regarding the Internet of Things, which is the topic of Zuboff's seventh chapter: The Reality Business.


1. The Prediction Imperative

We've been reading more and more in the education news about the data that schools are not seeking to collect about their students in order to create better predictive algorithms. Not just attendance in class, but going to the library, etc. That is what this chapter is about: the need to gather more and more data to create new predictive products:
Even the most sophisticated process of converting behavioral surplus into products that accurately forecast the future is only as good as the raw material available. [...] Surveillance capitalists therefore must ask this: what forms of surplus enable the fabrication of prediction products that most reliably foretell the future? This question marks a critical turning point in the trial-and-error elaboration of surveillance capitalism. It crystallizes a second economic imperative—the prediction imperative—and reveals the intense pressure that it exerts on surveillance capitalist revenues. [...] Compelled to improve predictions, surveillance capitalists such as Google understood that they had to widen and diversify their extraction architectures to accommodate new sources of surplus and new supply operations.
Zuboff presents the data-gathering grab as two different processes: extension and depth. Extension is about reach:
Extension wants your bloodstream and your bed, your breakfast conversation, your commute, your run, your refrigerator, your parking space, your living room.
So, in education, that means not just what is happening in the classroom, but in the dorm room, the library, dining halls, etc.

Then, there is depth:
The idea here is that highly predictive, and therefore highly lucrative, behavioral surplus would be plumbed from intimate patterns of the self. These supply operations are aimed at your personality, moods, and emotions, your lies and vulnerabilities.
In this context, think about "sentiment analysis" and other data-mining that schools want to run on LMS discussion boards or students' social media, their Internet search history, etc. 

Beyond the data gathering, broad and deep, is the behavior modification; this is what Zuboff calls economies of action:
Behavioral surplus must be vast and varied, but the surest way to predict behavior is to intervene at its source and shape it. The processes invented to achieve this goal are what I call economies of action. [...] These interventions are designed to enhance certainty by doing things: they nudge, tune, herd, manipulate, and modify behavior in specific directions.
Yep, all the nudges. Educators will claim that they are seeking to modify student behaviors only in positive directions, for positive outcomes. That is why one of the main questions we all need to asking ourselves is how we see our role as educators. Is behavior modification at the heart of our teaching project? Or do we have other ideas about our roles as teachers? One good way to address that question is to ask yourself about how you would feel being continuously monitored and nudged to change your behavior as a teacher. For more on that, see this powerful new essay by Alfie Kohn: How Not to Get a Standing Ovation at a Teachers’ Conference.

2. The Tender Conquest of Unrestrained Animals

This section of the chapter is really eye-opening: Zuboff looks at the use of telemetry used by scientists to monitor animals and climate, gathering data that could never be collected in a zoo or replicated in a laboratory:
It was a time when scientists reckoned with the obstinacy of free-roaming animals and concluded that surveillance was the necessary price of knowledge. Locking these creatures in a zoo would only eliminate the very behavior that scientists wanted to study, but how were they to be surveilled? [...] The key principle was that his telematics operated outside an animal’s awareness.
One such scientist was R. Stuart MacKay
MacKay’s inventions enabled scientists to render animals as information even when they believed themselves to be free, wandering and resting, unaware of the incursion into their once-mysterious landscapes.  
One of the recurring themes throughout this chapter is the tension between scientific curiosity and capitalist exploitation:
MacKay yearned for discovery, but today’s “experimenters” yearn for certainty as they translate our lives into calculations. [...] Now, the un-self-conscious, easy freedom enjoyed by the human animal—the sense of being unrestrained that thrives in the mystery of distant places and intimate spaces—is simply friction on the path toward surveillance revenues.
That "easy freedom" is something that I am prepared to fight for, as an educator.

3. Human Herds

In this section, Zuboff focuses on work by Joseph Paradiso and his colleagues at the MIT Media Lab, with their quest to build something like a browser for reality itself, a browser not for an Internet of webpages but for that Internet of things... all the things. 
Just as browsers like Netscape first “gave us access to the mass of data contained on the internet, so will software browsers enable us to make sense of the flood of sensor data that is on the way.” [...] Paradiso is confident that “a proper interface to this artificial sensoria promises to produce… a digital omniscience… a pervasive everywhere augmented reality environment… that can be intuitively browsed” just as web browsers opened up the data contained on the internet.
Again, this sense of scientific challenge cannot afford to ignore the business ramifications:
For all their brilliance, these creative scientists appear to be unaware of the restless economic order eager to commandeer their achievements under the flag of surveillance revenues.
That is my fear also: yes, there might be things I am curious to know about my students, and things it might even be useful for me to know, but not at the risk of empowering data-gathering processes and markets that extend far beyond my classroom, real or virtual.

4. Surveillance Capitalism’s Realpolitik

In this chapter, Zuboff shifts from that sense of scientific curiosity into the real business projects based on converting reality into a data stream, with a focus on IBM’s $3 billion investment in the “internet of things,” a project led by Harriet Green. For these projects to succeed, there cannot be "dark data," data that is out of reach:
Because the apparatus of connected things is intended to be everything, any behavior of human or thing absent from this push for universal inclusion is dark: menacing, untamed, rebellious, rogue, out of control. [...] The tension is that no thing counts until it is rendered as behavior, translated into electronic data flows, and channeled into the light as observable data. Everything must be illuminated for counting and herding. [quoting Harriet Green] “You know the amount of data being created on a daily basis—much of which will go to waste unless it is utilized. This so-called dark data represents a phenomenal opportunity… the ability to use sensors for everything in the world to basically be a computer, whether it’s your contact lens, your hospital bed, or a railway track.”
At the same time that ed-tech seeks to gather all the data of a student's life, they are also de-contextualizing that data, rendering everything as behavior, objectifying everything and everyone:
Each rendered bit is liberated from its life in the social, no longer inconveniently encumbered by moral reasoning, politics, social norms, rights, values, relationships, feelings, contexts, and situations. In the flatness of this flow, data are data, and behavior is behavior. [...] All things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable “it.” [...] His washing machine, her car’s accelerator, and your intestinal flora are collapsed into a single dimension of equivalency as information assets that can be disaggregated, reconstituted, indexed, browsed, manipulated, analyzed, reaggregated, predicted, productized, bought, and sold: anywhere, anytime.
It used to be that student "surveillance" consisted of teachers taking attendance and giving tests. The world of ed-tech surveillance has changed that into something profoundly different, and profoundly alienating for both students and teachers. Our classroom is not our classroom any longer.

5. Certainty for Profit

This section focuses on the way that predictive products fundamentally change the nature of a business like insurance, which is no longer about communities and shared risk, but individualization based on data analytics and predictive algorithms. Does anybody know of a good write-up on how the same process could undermine education? Traditionally, education was a community project, but it seems to me that, by analogy, the predictive analytics that are fundamentally changing the insurance business will change the education business in the same way.

Here are some of Zuboff's comments about telematics in the auto insurance world:
This leads to demutualization and a focus on predicting and managing individual risks rather than communities. [...] Telematics are not intended merely to know but also to do (economies of action). They are hammers; they are muscular; they enforce. Behavioral underwriting promises to reduce risk through machine processes designed to modify behavior in the direction of maximum profitability. [...] Telematics announce a new day of behavioral control.
Another ominous education parallel is the use of gamification (think ClassDojo); when people push back on these metrics as an invasion of privacy, the insurance companies respond with fun gamification:
If price inducements don’t work, insurers are counseled to present behavioral monitoring as “fun,” “interactive,” “competitive,” and “gratifying,” rewarding drivers for improvements on their past record and “relative to the broader policy holder pool.” [...] In this approach, known as “gamification,” drivers can be engaged to participate in “performance based contests” and “incentive based challenges.”
Of course, gamification does not have to work this way... but it can. And for how that is playing out in education, see Ben Williamson on ClassDojo here: Killer Apps for the Classroom? Developing Critical Perspectives on ClassDojo and the ‘Ed-tech’ Industry

6. Executing the Uncontract

In this chapter, Zuboff discusses how what is today the stuff of marketing hype was stuff that would once have been considered a dystopian nightmare. 
Yet now that same nightmare is rendered as an enthusiastic progress report on surveillance capitalism’s latest triumphs. [...] How has the nightmare become banal? Where is our sense of astonishment and outrage?
To answer this question, Zuboff proposes the idea of an uncontract, which has rendered us as passive agents:
The uncontract is not a space of contractual relations but rather a unilateral execution that makes those relations unnecessary. The uncontract desocializes the contract, manufacturing certainty through the substitution of automated procedures for promises, dialogue, shared meaning, problem solving, dispute resolution, and trust: the expressions of solidarity and human agency that have been gradually institutionalized in the notion of “contract” over the course of millennia. [...] The uncontract bypasses all that social work in favor of compulsion.
What Zuboff calls the "substitution of machine work for social work" is an enormous threat in education today, with the most vulnerable populations to most likely to have their agency institutionalized.

7. Inevitabilism

The nightmare has not just become normalized; it has become inevitable.
Among high-tech leaders, within the specialist literature, and among expert professionals there appears to be universal agreement on the idea that everything will be connected, knowable, and actionable in the near future: ubiquity and its consequences in total information are an article of faith. [...] Paradiso’s conception of a “digital omniscience” is taken for granted, with little discussion of politics, power, markets, or governments. As in most accounts of the apparatus, questions of individual autonomy, moral reasoning, social norms and values, privacy, decision rights, politics, and law take the form of afterthoughts and genuflections that can be solved with the correct protocols or addressed with still more technology solutions.
Are data analytics inevitable? The folks at Instructure think so (Instructure CEO Dan Goldsmith: "So when you think about adaptive and personalized learning I think it's inevitable"), but Zuboff reminds us about the three essential questions we must ask, questions whose answers are not inevitable.
What if I don’t want my life streaming through your senses? Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?
There then follows one of the most interesting parts of this chapter: Zuboff talked to Silicon Valley engineers to find out what they thought about inevitabilism. Answer: these insiders at the heart of the "inevitability" know better.
Nearly every interviewee regarded inevitability rhetoric as a Trojan horse for powerful economic imperatives.
Here is a quote from one of those interviewees:
“There’s all that dumb real estate out there and we’ve got to turn it into revenue. The ‘internet of things’ is all push, not pull. Most consumers do not feel a need for these devices. You can say ‘exponential’ and ‘inevitable’ as much as you want. The bottom line is that the Valley has decided that this has to be the next big thing so that firms here can grow.”
Push, not pull: that to me is very much what is happening with analytics in the LMS. And when you push back and say you do not want them, lo and behold, you cannot turn them off. I just want the ability to opt out, but I am growing less and less hopeful about that. And I still can't turn off the (wrong) Canvas Gradebook labeling of my students.

8. Men Made It

The title of this subchapter is from Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath where it is the banking system, made by men but beyond our control: The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.


Thus the bitter paradox of using our agency to build systems that deprive us of agency:
Every doctrine of inevitability carries a weaponized virus of moral nihilism programmed to target human agency and delete resistance and creativity from the text of human possibility.
Zuboff insists it does not have to be this way; it is NOT inevitable.
We know that there can be alternative paths to a robust information capitalism that produces genuine solutions for a third modernity. [...] Inevitabilism precludes choice and voluntary participation. It leaves no room for human will as the author of the future. [...] Will inevitabilism’s utopian declarations summon new forms of coercion designed to quiet restless populations unable to quell their hankering for a future of their choice?
And I return again and again to the most distinctive feature in Canvas LMS: there is no choice. You cannot build a course in Canvas predicated on the idea that students will choose to do things, or not to do things. The learning management system turns student agency into compliance.

And data collection.

9. To the Ground Campaign

The final chapter is about Google's Sidewalk Labs and the creation of "Google Cities." Mutatis mutandis, you can see the same thing happening to universities as they allow themselves to be rendered as data. Ironically, Sidewalk Labs presents itself as a way to combat digital inequality, just as some proponents of learning analytics insist that they, too, want to help students:
Sidewalk Labs’ first public undertaking was the installation of several hundred free internet-enabled kiosks in New York City, ostensibly to combat the problem of “digital inequality.” [...] Sidewalk’s data flows combine public and private assets for sale in dynamic, real-time virtual markets that extract maximum fees from citizens and leave municipal governments dependent upon Sidewalk’s proprietary information.
So, yes, this is what I thought about at Can*Innovate: while people cheer on the ability to track student views of LMS Pages, the real discussion are happening offstage:
The realpolitik of commercial surveillance operations is concealed offstage while the chorus of actors singing and dancing under the spotlights holds our attention and sometimes even our enthusiasm. [...quoting Google's Eric Schmidt] “The genesis of the thinking for Sidewalk Labs came from Google’s founders getting excited thinking of ‘all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge.’”
Do we really want to put the LMS more and more in charge of the education we deliver online? I certainly do not, which is why I am still (still...) hoping for the ability to opt out of Instructure's use of data from my courses for its machine learning experiments and the development of its predictive algorithms.

I don't want to predict my students' futures. I want them to choose their futures, and I will do my best to then help them get there.

September 15, 2019

Zuboff, Chapter 6: Hijacked! The Queen's to Command

Once again, my Zuboff note-taking resonates eerily with what I see happening in the ed-tech world around me. Last week, I skipped writing up notes from Zuboff to document the weird Twitter event surrounding #ChangeWithAnalytics; here's that post: The Buzz and the Buzzkill. When I resumed note-taking this week with Zuboff's Chapter 6, the opening topic of that chapter — conquest by declaration — resonated perfectly with the declarations by the #ChangeWithAnalytics crew:


To make things even more eerie, just as Zuboff analyzes six declarations by Google (see below), there are also six principles being promulgated as part of #ChangeWithAnaytics: "The thoughtful application of the following six principles will accelerate the meaningful use of analytics and take advantage of the power of data to make the decisions and take the actions that just may save higher education. Really." Here are their principles with cutesey graphics; for Google's declarations, read on.


To get started, Zuboff takes us back to 1492:
On December 4, 1492, Columbus escaped the onshore winds that had prevented his departure from the island that we now call Cuba. Within a day he dropped anchor off the coast of a larger island known to its people as Quisqueya or Bohio, setting into motion what historians call the “conquest pattern.” ]...] It’s a design that unfolds in three phases: the invention of legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a gloss of justification, a declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a town to legitimate and institutionalize the conquest.
The unsuspecting inhabitants are now the Queen's to command:
Convinced that the island was “his best find so far, with the most promising environment and the most ingenious inhabitants,” he declared to Queen Isabella, “it only remains to establish a Spanish presence and order them to perform your will. For… they are yours to command and make them work, sow seed, and do whatever else is necessary, and build a town, and teach them to wear clothes and adopt our customs.”
Zuboff brings in the philosopher John Searle's work on speech acts to help us grasp just what is going on with this type of declaration:
A declaration is a particular way of speaking and acting that establishes facts out of thin air, creating a new reality where there was nothing [...] asserting a new reality by describing the world as if a desired change were already true: “All humans are created equal.” “They are yours to command.” As Searle concludes, “All of institutional reality, and therefore… all of human civilization is created by… declarations.”
A key feature of this conquest is the insistence on its inevitability, as we hear also in the ed-tech world (Instructure CEO Dan Goldsmith: "So when you think about adaptive and personalized learning I think it's inevitable..." and also the inevitabilism of the #ChangeWithAnalytics campaign):
As historian Matthew Restall writes: Sixteenth-century Spaniards consistently presented their deeds and those of their compatriots in terms that prematurely anticipated the completion of Conquest campaigns and imbued Conquest chronicles with an air of inevitability. The native people were summoned, advised, and forewarned in a language they could not fathom to surrender without resistance in recognition of authorities they could not conceive.
Zuboff then presents the claims of Google, showing how they serve the same function of conquest:
(1) We claim human experience as raw material free for the taking. 
(2) On the basis of our claim, we assert the right to take an individual’s experience for translation into behavioral data.  
(3) Our right to take, based on our claim of free raw material, confers the right to own the behavioral data derived from human experience.  
(4) Our rights to take and to own confer the right to know what the data disclose.  
(5) Our rights to take, to own, and to know confer the right to decide how we use our knowledge.  
(6) Our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide confer our rights to the conditions that preserve our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide.
As Zuboff shows, while it was Google who pioneered this data-dispossession strategy, it is now a pervasive corporate practice, and of course we see it in the new moves by the LMSes, as Instructure has claimed the right to consider what we do inside the LMS as experience free for them to take and to translate into behavioral data (even if that has nothing to do with the goals and purposes of our actions). On that basis, Instructure also claims the right to know what that data disclose (even if we do not need or want an ed-tech company to know these things about us), and to act on that knowledge (even if those actions are misguided or unwelcome, like the Gradebook labeling).

The "division of learning" that Zuboff then invokes is meant to echo the "division of labor," which was a hallmark of late 19th- and 20th-century capitalism.
In our time the division of learning emerges from the economic sphere as a new principle of social order and reflects the primacy of learning, information, and knowledge in today’s quest for effective life. [...]  Today our societies are threatened as the division of learning drifts into pathology and injustice at the hands of the unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that surveillance capitalism has achieved.
Now, instead of a division of labor, it is a division of learning, which involves knowledge, authority, and power, expressed in the form of three questions:
The first question is “Who knows?”
The second question is “Who decides?”
The third question is “Who decides who decides?”
The deskilling of humans in order to invest in machines which Zuboff describes as an early phase of surveillance capitalism is exactly the crisis we are now facing in education, as more and more purveyors of ed-tech tell us that it is not the teachers or the students who know; it is the machines... and so we should invest, not in people, but in those machines, turning over not just our money, but also the actual work of education.
The answer to the question Who knows? was that the machine knows, along with an elite cadre able to wield the analytic tools to troubleshoot and extract value from information. [...] How different might our society be if US businesses had chosen to invest in people as well as in machines? [...] Most companies opted for the smart machine over smart people, producing a well-documented pattern that favors substituting machines and their algorithms for human contributors in a wide range of jobs.
Indeed! And how different the whole field of online education would look right now if most schools and colleges had spent the past 20 years investing not in LMS companies and their contraptions, but instead in the teachers and students who are engaged in the actual work of education.

As a result of the data-dispossession process which is now fully entrenched in education, the LMSes and companies like TurnItIn control what Zuboff describes as the two texts. There is one outward text which we both read and write: our posts in the LMS discussion boards, the answers we enter for quizzes, the essays we deposit in the dropbox. That first text might feel like it is "us," like it is "ours," but it is in reality just a business mechanism, a way for Instructure and TurnItIn to construct the shadow text on which their data-based businesses depend:
The first text actually functions as the supply operation for the second text: the shadow text. [...] The shadow text is a burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus and its analyses, and it says more about us than we can know about ourselves. [...] Worse still, it becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to the shadow text. It automatically feeds on our experience as we engage in the normal and necessary routines of social participation. [...] As the source from which all the treasure flows, this second text is about us, but it is not for us. Instead, it is created, maintained, and exploited outside our awareness for others’ benefit.
This is why Instructure is going to find it very hard to accommodate requests to opt-out of the data-mining. It used to be that we could just use the LMS, and all the data was just dumped at the end of the course. Now, all that digital exhaust is what the company runs on; they cannot do without it, which means they cannot just let us opt out. And, just like the conquistadors, they did not ask us to opt in. They simply took the data, building the shadow text without securing our permission to do so, at least not in any meaningful way. Instead, they presented us with take-it-or-leave-it terms-of-service that simply made us the Queen's to command.

The dangers are real, and they are much bigger than ed-tech; as Zuboff shows, this is a question about the future of democracy, about the future of "the future" itself:
Surveillance capitalism’s ability to corrupt and control these texts produces unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power. [...] These trends [are] incompatible not only with privacy but with the very possibility of democracy, which depends upon a reservoir of individual capabilities associated with autonomous moral judgment and self-determination.
And for those of us who believe in democratic education, these words from Paul Schwartz (Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology) are chilling:
The more that is known about a person, the easier it is to control him. Insuring the liberty that nourishes democracy requires a structuring of societal use of information and even permitting some concealment of information.
So too with ed-tech: knowing "everything" about students in order to more fully control them does not advance the cause of education; just the opposite.

Zuboff closes the chapter with the warning that the struggle we now face is unprecedented. That is also why we were caught off guard:
We were caught off guard because there was no way that we could have imagined these acts of invasion and dispossession, any more than the first unsuspecting Taíno cacique could have foreseen the rivers of blood that would flow from his inaugural gesture of hospitality toward the hairy, grunting, sweating men, the adelantados who appeared out of thin air waving the banner of the Spanish monarchs and their pope as they trudged across the beach.
I remember how these passages about the Conquest floored me when I read the book the first time last spring. For literally 20 years I looked on the LMS as some clunky piece of junk, and I could not understand why teachers were using it when we had so many better alternatives. In my preoccupation with the clunkiness of the LMS, like the awkwardness of those grunting, sweating conquistadors, I failed to realize how sinister the LMS had become until there it was: machine-learning and predictive algorithms that claim to foretell my students' educational outcomes before we even begin the semester, dispossessing us of our right to the future tense. It is our freedom that is at stake here:
These operations challenge our elemental right to the future tense, which is the right to act free of the influence of illegitimate forces that operate outside our awareness to influence, modify, and condition our behavior.
So ends Part I of Zuboff's book, and I'll move on to Part II next week.

~ ~ ~

An Instructure update. Back in July, Jared Stein wrote a blog post at the Canvas blog: Power to the People with Canvas Data and Analytics (and just as Zuboff warns, the cycle of data dispossession likes to wrap itself up in the rhetoric of freedom and empowerment). At the time, Jared said there would be further details in a future blog post, so I just now checked to see if another post had shown up. Nothing yet, but I saw this new post: Growing the Wonderful World of Learning.  Check out the first sentence; it's one of those surreal declarations that is gaslight-worthy: We don’t look at education as a “business”


Anyway, nothing new yet at the Canvas blog about the possibilities of a data opt-out but until I actually hear the words "no, there will be no opt-out," I am going to keep on asking.

And I'll be back with Chapter 7 of Zuboff next week. Thanks for reading!


September 9, 2019

10 Online Teaching Tips... for Daily Announcements

Via Mike Wesch at Twitter, I saw this #onlineteachingtips and thought I would join in. I'm such a list-making nerd that I decided to do 10 tips based on how I use the daily announcements in my classes. This was fun and easy to do, so I think I'll make some other "10 tips" lists looking at different features of my class in the future, like "10 tips for online orientation" or "10 tips for student blogging," etc. The daily announcements are a kind of gateway to everything that's going on in my classes, so it seemed like a good place to start!

1. Use daily announcements. If you go to one of my courses in Canvas, you will see the daily announcements blog, which is what I use for the homepage in Canvas. For example, here's the Myth-Folklore class: Myth.MythFolklore.net. I never know what schedule my students will be on, but every day of the week, there's somebody checking in, and some students do a little bit of class work every day. This way there are fresh announcement each day: something's always going on! I prep the announcements to go live at midnight; I'm asleep then, but the announcements never sleep. :-)


2. Emphasize key information on top. I make sure that the most essential information students need is at the top of the announcements. The links to current assignments are at the very top, with class procedural reminders below. I try to keep it focused too, with just two or three reminders each day. One of my long-term goals for online teaching is minimizing email, and these daily announcements with key info up top have really helped with that.

3. Share lots of content for fun and curiosity. Especially teaching Gen. Ed. courses, one of my goals is to expose students to lots of stuff: online resources, books, art, music. There are students from all kinds of backgrounds, majoring in all kinds of subjects, with all kinds of career plans: I cannot know in advance what will click with a specific student, but I use the announcements as a place of serendipity!

4. Feature current students in the announcements. Each day in the announcements I include something from the student blog network (here's our blog network). For example, today I featured an extra credit Tech Tip that someone did, learning how to make her own LOLcat; here's the LOLcat she shared in her post: so cute!


5. Feature past student work  in the announcements. Each day I also include a student project from a past semester; those past projects can be a source of inspiration and ideas for the current students, plus it reminds them that the work they are doing is important... the content they create now will be an important part of the class for future students (here's our archive).


6. Use randomizers to surface even more content. In the sidebar of the announcements blog, there are various randomizers so that every time the page loads (including in Canvas), there's new stuff going on. So, in addition to the student project in the main announcements, random student projects are showing up in the sidebar too. I use a free tool, RotateContent.com (created by one of my students) to create these randomizers; here's how the randomizers work. With hundreds of past student projects that I want to feature, random is the way to go!

7. Collect and share videos. I teach writing classes, but I know a lot of students really enjoy videos in addition to reading text, so I have lots of YouTube playlists where I save videos that I think might be useful/interesting, and I include a couple videos every day in the announcements, plus random videos in the sidebar too. Crash Course Mythology videos are a fantastic resource for my classes for example:


8. Model digital skills. All of my students are blogging in their own blogs, and for most of them it is the first time they have created their own personal web presence online. I try to model different kinds of content in the announcements blog, like embedding videos, embedding tweets, etc. in order to inspire them to try similar experiments of their own. If they want, they can learn more about that at the extra credit Tech Tips.

9. Promote a culture of learning. I include content in the blog that focuses on the kinds of learning habits and skills that I hope the students will be able to take away from the class and to use in life-at-large. I include lots of graphics and videos about reading and about writing, along with "meta" content for learning about learning. Take the growth mindset cats, for example. Each mindset cat is linked to a blog post at my Mindset blog. You never know when a student might be curious and click to learn more. This cat, for example, will take you to an infographic about 29 ways to stay creative. (If you want to use the mindset cats yourself, they're available as a Canvas widget here.)

10. Build the announcements into an assignment. I'm a big believer in all kinds of extra credit (I should definitely write up 10 tips on using extra credit in online course design!)... and one of the extra credit options is a back-up and review option each week (here's a typical week) where students can look back through the past week of announcements, picking out a few favorite items which they write up in a blog post. That then becomes a great learning experiment for me; I am always very interested to find out what kind of content in the announcements attracts people's attention.


September 8, 2019

#ChangeWithAnalytics: The Buzz and the Buzzkill

Instead of notes for Zuboff this week (I'll be back with Chapter 6 next week!), I wanted to take a moment to document the #ChangeWithAnalytics Buzz event last week. It was fun to use the power of Twitter in a kind of "Occupy Analytics Street" (we are the 99%!), having our tweets appear on the ChangeWithAnalytics.com website.

The AIR-EDUCAUSE-NACUBO cabal can apply their marketing spin and spend their marketing budget, but that doesn't mean they are going to get the positive buzz they want. The people managing the website were asleep at the wheel for about 36 hours, starting from when Autumm Caines shared her criticisms of the report at 5PM on Tuesday; that's how I first learned about it:


Then Chris Gilliard noticed the "Buzz" page aggregating the tweets:


Jeannie Crowley confirmed: the "Buzz" was on auto-pilot and unattended, displaying all #changewithanalytics tweets.



I took a screenshot that I shared Tuesday night at around 11PM, thinking for sure the Twitter feed on the Buzz page would be shut down before morning, and I wanted to document it. Here you can see Jeannie's tweet showing up there on the page:


About that same time, Tom Evans chimed in with what was, I think, the most liked of all the #changewithanalytics tweets: Edtech will not save you.


In the morning, I was very surprised to see that the Buzz webpage was still buzzing: not only were all the critical tweets appearing at the website, no one from any of these organizations had bothered to take the time to reply to any of us or to use the hashtag themselves. I continued to take screenshots during the day on Wednesday:



I've created a WAKELET with all the #changewithanalytics tweets; quite a conversation ensued. In parts sarcastic, but in parts serious, with some insightful observations and sharing of useful resources. A much-liked and retweeted item was this one from Melissa Hubbard:


I personally liked this one from "John Henry" about the weird meta-quality of the whole incident:


Amazingly, things carried on all day Wednesday, through the night, and we were still able to "buzz" the site on Thursday morning.

Finally, the feed was removed, without explanation, around noon on Thursday:


Was there any kind of engagement of any kind from the purveyors of this report?

No, there was not.

And that's not surprising: the top-down, holier-than-thou, resistance-is-futile tone of both the website and the report is what ignited the Twitter event itself. This website claimed to represent the higher ed community, as you can see here (very cutesy loading of the numbers, oooh, ahhh): About Us.


But surely they cannot claim to speak for me or for the students in my classes simply because my school and some of its administrators are members of these professional organizations...?

And here's some language from their Statement: people will be jarred; expectations must be managed.


But it's clearly not just about managing expectations. What we saw instead this week was something much more insidious:
Doubts must be ignored.
Dissent must be deleted.
and so on ... until:
You will be assimilated.

Will there be opportunities for dialogue in the future? I hope that instead of just shutting down the Twitter conversation, people from this organization will engage, and so do in a public online space... because I doubt any of us who were tweeting this week are going to scrape together $1630 for the registration fee at the NACUBO Forum in September. Just for starters.

Anyway, we're at Twitter, here in the cheap seats.

You know where to find us, #ChangeWithAnalytics. :-)