if we don’t support young people in building out a strategically rich graph, they will reinforce the worst segments of our society
Source: Ep. 102 danah boyd “Seeing New Worlds” – Team Human
Via: 🎧 “Seeing New Worlds” danah boyd (Team Human) | Read Write Collect
The fact that an organization that should be leading the effective, thoughtful, responsible use of technology in education implemented such a fad at an event for educators is troubling. The ISTE Expo Halls were a frenzy of Apple, Google, Microsoft and others creating demand for their “learning opportunities” and giveaways with massive lines of early morning attendees hoping for tickets, invites, tokens. The whole time, throughout the Convention Centre, the Big Players deployed troops to frantically scan the QR codes of individuals waiting in line. So what exactly does this evidence tell us about personalized learning and how instructive will it be to ISTE’s sponsors when they receive this data? How will this data shape education? What does it tell us about learning, about institutional deprivation in the teaching profession? Is this about improving learning or the relentless drive of the ed tech industry?
At one expo stand we spoke with a thoughtful educator who asked if we were interested in the “monitor” function of the software on display. We asked what this did. “It allows you to monitor the activities of your students while they use the software. You can see if they are on-task.” We groaned. “Well, you are clearly not American,” came the reaction. Is the mindless use of personal data really going to result in such unfortunate generalisations? As we were leaving the booth the attempt to scan our badges failed. The blank spaces on our badges were noted gravely. Knowing glances were exchanged. We were part of The Others.
Everyone involved in education needs to take a stand against this kind of “personalized learning”. Forego the tee-shirt, the exclusive “hands-on” session invitation, offers to see the School of the Future, the stickbait badges, the free chargers.
Remember who schools are for. Before it’s too late.
Source: ISTE, Digital Tracking, and the Myth of Personalized Learning – maelstrom
there’s a problem with computer technology. Culturally. Ideologically. There’s a problem with the Internet. Largely designed by men from the developed world, it is built for men of the developed world. Men of science. Men of industry. Military men. Venture capitalists. Despite all the hype and hope about revolution and access and opportunity that these new technologies will provide us, they do not negate hierarchy, history, privilege, power. They reflect those. They channel it. They concentrate it, in new ways and in old.
Source: Men Explain Technology to Me: On Gender, Ed-Tech, and the Refusal to Be Silent
The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising – a declining market for American publishers – goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook – and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters.
Source: How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News
Via: Report Shows U.S. Citizens Helped Coordinate Online Disinformation Assault From Macedonia | Techdirt
The fact that an organization that should be leading the effective, thoughtful, responsible use of technology in education implemented such a fad at an event for educators is troubling. The ISTE Expo Halls were a frenzy of Apple, Google, Microsoft and others creating demand for their “learning opportunities” and giveaways with massive lines of early morning attendees hoping for tickets, invites, tokens. The whole time, throughout the Convention Centre, the Big Players deployed troops to frantically scan the QR codes of individuals waiting in line. So what exactly does this evidence tell us about personalized learning and how instructive will it be to ISTE’s sponsors when they receive this data? How will this data shape education? What does it tell us about learning, about institutional deprivation in the teaching profession? Is this about improving learning or the relentless drive of the ed tech industry?
At one expo stand we spoke with a thoughtful educator who asked if we were interested in the “monitor” function of the software on display. We asked what this did. “It allows you to monitor the activities of your students while they use the software. You can see if they are on-task.” We groaned. “Well, you are clearly not American,” came the reaction. Is the mindless use of personal data really going to result in such unfortunate generalisations? As we were leaving the booth the attempt to scan our badges failed. The blank spaces on our badges were noted gravely. Knowing glances were exchanged. We were part of The Others.
Everyone involved in education needs to take a stand against this kind of “personalized learning”. Forego the tee-shirt, the exclusive “hands-on” session invitation, offers to see the School of the Future, the stickbait badges, the free chargers.
Remember who schools are for. Before it’s too late.
Source: ISTE, Digital Tracking, and the Myth of Personalized Learning – maelstrom
The meritocracy myth, prevalent in tech and Silicon Valley, makes it all the harder to think structurally.
Source: Tech Regrets, Structural Ideology, and the Addiction Metaphor – Ryan Boren
It’s fashionable to treat the dysfunctions of social media as the result of the naivete of early technologists, who failed to foresee these outcomes. The truth is that the ability to build Facebook-like services is relatively common. What was rare was the moral recklessness necessary to go through with it.
Source: Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags – Locus Online
Aye. Some of us refused to build such a thing.
Writing long before Mark Zuckerberg was born, and anxiously gazing towards the computer dominated future, the social critic Lewis Mumford tried to understand why people would willingly (even eagerly) embrace technologies with severe downsides. To Mumford there were two types of technologies: democratic ones (such as bicycles) that strengthened personal autonomy; and authoritarian ones (such as computers) that ultimately came to exert total power over their users. In seeking to explain why people, and a society, would opt for authoritarian technologies over democratic ones, Mumford argued that authoritarian technologies (which he also called megatechnics) operate as a wonderful bribe. What this bribe represented was a way in which these technologies, in exchange for acquiescence, offered people a share of the impressive things these technologies could produce. Writing in 1970, Mumford warned that accepting the bribe gradually led to the elimination of alternatives to it, and he noted that for those who accept the bribe, “their ‘real’ life will be confined within the frame of a television screen” (Mumford, 331) – though today we might just as easily say “within the frame of a computer or smartphone screen.” And as he glumly continued, “to enjoy total automation, a significant portion of the population is already willing to become automatons” (Mumford, 332). Granted, as Mumford also noted, it was not that everything offered by the bribe was rubbish, rather “if one examines separately only the immediate products of megatechnics, these claims, these promises, are valid, and these achievements are genuine” but what Mumford highlighted was that “all these goods remain valuable only if more important human concerns are not overlooked or eradicated” (Mumford, 333).
Facebook is an excellent example of this bribe at work.
Platforms like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and the like are all the bribes that convince people not to war against computerized control by offering them a little share of the goodies. A turn of phrase that Mumford returned to repeatedly throughout his oeuvre is the difference between “the good life” and “the goods life” – and he argued that things such as the bribe were the tools by which people came to mistake “the goods life” for “the good life.”
Source: Facebook – to delete, or not to delete? | LibrarianShipwreck
They are fairly similar in their inability to deal with consumers at a human level. That is the challenge of our times.
Having watched technology go from a curio to curiosity to a daily necessity, I can safely say that we in tech don’t understand the emotional aspect of our work, just as we don’t understand the moral imperative of what we do. It is not that all players are bad; it is just not part of the thinking process the way, say, “minimum viable product” or “growth hacking” are.
Source: Technology and the Moral Dimension – Om on Tech
Make intersectionality, design for real life, and the social model of disability part of the process. These should be in a tech worker’s vocabulary.
I (and my company) have come to believe that the use of commercial facial recognition in law enforcement or in government surveillance of any kind is wrong — and that it opens the door for gross misconduct by the morally corrupt.
Source: Facial recognition software is not ready for use by law enforcement | TechCrunch
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