OpenEducation
For a network of commons
Nov 17th
I kept the faith and I kept voting/Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand/For theirs is a land with a wall around it/ And mine is a faith in my fellow man/Theirs is a land of hope and glory/Mine is the green field and the factory floor/Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers/And mine is the peace we knew/Between the wars
Billy Bragg, Between the Wars.
Yesterday the Education Activist Network emailed though a series of YouTube videos about student protests and occupations at UC-Berkeley. These highlighted the increased politicisation of young people, the increased militarisation of our campuses, and the increased bravery of people as co-operative social forces in the face of State authoritarianism. More appropriately, this might be viewed as bravery in the face of the brutality of the transnational global elites that now dominate the control mechanisms of the State. Those control mechanisms include universal access to healthcare, access to employment and education, access to homes, and/or paramilitary-style policing. In each of these areas the political/economic compact of recent years is in crisis, and this crisis is being played out in education.
The nature of transnational elites has been raised in documentaries like Inside Job, in popular More >
Triple Crunch and Academic Activism
Nov 4th
I want to make a brief return to one implication of the ideas fleshed out by Joss Winn earlier this year in a post on the Triple Crunch, which focused on peak oil, climate change and the economic realities of business-as-usual, and then in my response on Triple Crunch and the Politics of Educational Technology. This implication is the role of academics and scholars; it is academic activism.
In his post Joss wrote: “It’s time that a co-ordinated effort was made by the sector to examine these issues in detail, involving academics from across disciplines as well as business continuity managers and VCs”. I concluded that academics and scholars might usefully contribute to story-telling that enables us “to critique in common the ahistorical truisms of liberal democracy, that technology and education can only meaningfully serve capitalist expansion, through discourses of finance capital that are related to value-for-money, efficiency, private/public, and the market.” We used the detail of climate change and liquid fuel availability inside our reality of capitalist social relations, to question the idea of the University.
This morning I read three things that stimulated a return to this question.
1. The weekly Oil Depletion Analysis Centre’s Newsletter (for 4 November 2011). In More >
In, Against and Beyond the Edufactory
Oct 15th
These are my notes from yesterday's sessions on cognitive capitalism, the University as knowledge factory and alternatives to higher education, from Mobility Shifts. I've also posted my tweets from a student discussion of occupy wall street and the response of the University to the crisis.
- The University has been subsumed within the circuit of capital, so that it has become emblematic of capitalist social relations, driven by the abstracted power of money.
- The University is now a flagship public-private partnership, whose primary purpose is the generation of surplus value through cognitive capital. The exploitation of labour and new sites of struggle are results of the increasing sophistication of the social factory, through which all of social life reveals sites of profit accumulation and the reproduction of capital.
- Biopiracy, proletarianisation, routinisation, precarity and globalised culture are all outcomes of this process.
- Disciplines become sites of the production of cognitive capital, separated out from each other denying forms of critique that might underpin alternatives. Moreover, a hidden curriculum, focused upon separation, competition and debt, anchors study to capital. As a result we see the wasted potential of co-operation and association.
- The idea of the University, as a site of all of living knowledge, is undermined in the More >
Mobility Shifts and Student-as-Producer
Oct 14th
Some matters arising from Mobility Shifts and from yesterday's student-as-producer seminar at CUNY.
- How do we critique formalised education as an ideological apparatus of the state-for-capital?
- Are we interested in transition or transformation? If the latter then what is the purpose of norms of justice, equality, democracy, participation that are developed within alienating, capitalist social relations? In the face of free market logic how might we overcome the anxieties that plague our existing models of education?
- Does education subtracted from the operation of learning leave accreditation, monitoring, control? Does this connect to institutional/tutor accreditation anxiety, realised through plagiarism?
- Capital needs disruptors, which/who can re-inscribe new spaces for control and accumulation, and develop new forms of commodities from which value can be extracted. What is the place of educational innovation inside capital in this process? How do we overcome this devastating reality?
- How conservative should schooling be, in order to promote mass intellectuality? How conservative are our allegedly radical methods? Can we be against explanation and for emancipation inside this historical moment?
- Where social inequality is at stake, in the face of the market and education as private property, how can we work for its negation? How can we refuse agendas of equality that are culturally revealed More >
In, Against, and Beyond The University: for the courage of boundary-less toil
Oct 11th
- At Liberty Plaza on Sunday, Žižek argued that “the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, [and so] we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism?"
- This re-framing of alternatives demands that we move against historically positivist thinking, which maintains business-as-usual as our only option. It demands that we move against simple problem-solving arguments that see us making puncture-repairs to reason, justice, and universality, or in plaintively arguing for “a better capitalism”. The more courageous step is to re-imagine and re-produce an overcoming More >
on academic activism, boundary-less toil and exodus
Sep 29th
The paradox of openness: in, against and beyond business-as-usual
Sep 8th
- In his book on the Cuban Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, George Lambie argues that academia is locked into problem-solving theory. This is aimed at supporting, interacting with, and adjusting the dominant order. This leads to the artificial organisation and construction of knowledge, which in turn closes off a revelation of how society works. It depoliticises and avoids. It is not critically open. It disempowers us in our attempts to transform the world.
- Thus, we need an ontological critique, as a process of analysis of how we experience the world and how we accept the elite’s interpretive myths – their hegemony over us. We need a revelation or a revealing or a revolution in our ways of thinking.
- Through this revealing we need a critique of established ideological or intellectual frameworks. We need a critique of their legitimacy within higher education. This forms a set of political acts, which is itself open to critique.
- This critique, More >
The paradox of openness?
Sep 1st
Next Tuesday Frances Bell, Josie Fraser, Helen Keegan and I will be contributing to a symposium at ALTC2011 on the paradox of openness. My 5 minutes will include some, none or most of what follows…
Closure and exclusion Following his leadership of the successful Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) occupation and work-in of 1971-72, the Communist and trades unionist Jimmy Reid was elected as Rector of the University of Glasgow. In his Rectoral Address Reid argued that
Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today… it is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It's the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision making.
Since May 2010 the UK’s Coalition Government have been quickening the pace of enclosure of our public spaces; of our exclusion from the preserved, open and shared places in which our society is re-invented. Within this process of exclusion and of enclosing space and time (both the present and, collapsed into it, the future), debt presents itself as a cold and calculating means of collectivised, individual indenture. And the formal, historical University as a site of social contribution, that once More >
sustainability, resilience, community and openness
Jun 17th
Rob Watson interviewed me for a DMU podcast earlier in the week. The conversation focused on imagining alternatives in higher education, with a specific nod towards discussions around sustainability and resilience, and the role of universities in communities. If any of what I said strikes a chord, then you might like to check out some of my writing about resilient higher education.
With Frances Bell, Cristina Costa, Josie Fraser and Helen Keegan, I have had a symposium accepted for ALTC 2011, on The Paradox of Openness: The High Costs of Giving Online.
You can check out my take on "open" in higher education or my current take on OERs, capitalism and social totality. These ideas will underpin my engagement with ideas of open, of commodifying education, and of the struggle for alternatives, in the symposium. There will be an accompanying "Paradox of Openness" playlist, probably on Spotify, and probably collaborative.
Beyond Cuts and Taxation: Critical Alternatives and the Idea of Higher Education
Mar 29th
