Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead people to join you.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I am no massive RBG fangirl — how much can you love a representative of carceral state power? — but this really speaks to me, because it’s how I try to do my job. It’s also how I think the job has to be done: higher education needs a culture shift in how we think about so many things, including accessibility, integrity, and data privacy, so it’s not enough for me to fight for better practice. I need my faculty to care about these issues too, and I need them to join the fight.

It’s not an excuse for tone-policing, though, and I seem to be seeing a lot of that online lately when it comes to folks earnestly engaged in the struggle for equity in higher education. People who don’t like the message begin shared have a tendency to complain about the manner rather than the content — especially if they feel attacked by the content. It’s how we got to a place where white people are more scared of being called racist than they are of doing racist shit. Going hard over the way people ask for change is one of those super-duper red flags.

I do acknowledge there’s a certain amount of privilege in being a short, white, feminine, soft-voiced person who does this work; not every body is perceived as non-threatening. I used to get upset at not being taken seriously, but now I treat it like a superpower that allows me to have difficult conversations — and say no! — with a gentle tone. I think I have the power to be persuasive in many spaces because of this. A kind of weaponized gentleness, in the words of a close friend. It feels gross, and at the same time, our privileges are our privileges. We can’t pretend they don’t exist; we just have to mobilize them in the service of positive change.

But!

I am aware of others who share my superpower and use it for evil. The ingratiating emails to faculty. The well-funded conferences. The smiling face. The kinder, gentler surveillance technology. I’ve been increasingly aware of the way pleasantness in edtech in particular is weaponized as an entré. I know, welcome to the world of sales, Brenna — but I guess I am still naive enough to think that educational tools shouldn’t be commodified in this way.

When I get these emails forwarded to me by concerned faculty, I am always troubled by how good they are. It gives Lionel Hutz pitching the monorail vibes — it’s persuasive stuff. They use language to show they understand the difficult position of faculty and the challenge of the role, and honestly, they come off a lot like contract cheating firms: I’m your friend, I know things are hard, I can fix this. The problem is that it’s not academic integrity that hangs in the balance but student data. You can’t un-ring that bell.

Anyway, it’s all got me thinking about how we lead people and how we share our message, and then need to be more persuasive and more honest (because we can’t be more slick) than the kind faces of EdTech’s bullshit. Centring the fight — the values! the reasons! the goals! — and telling the story in a way that makes people want to join the fight. I have to believe that’s the best remedy.

Although the assholes are clearly winning at the moment. So who knows.

It makes me think about a lot of EdTech, honestly — these feature rollouts for more and more and more and more surveillance that no one actually asked for. Great, I get to know what time my learner usually opens their word processor. I never asked for this, and no one is teaching me how to use this data. Sure, it’s not a VR helmet that kills you, but it opens the door to potential bias. And again, much like the opportunity (?) to die inside a game, it’s not something anyone actually asked for.

Meta just got legs and this guy wants to take your head off.

Virtual Reality has been the “next big thing” in Educational Technologies for as long as I’ve been in the discipline and longer, and most of it is really bad. Like, the number of times I have seen the most straight-ahead lecture replicated, but I don’t know, we’re in space now, and we’re all supposed to pretend its innovative. If I could VR my way into a Magic-School-Bus-style fieldtrip, you could probably talk me into it. But investing in a VR headset so some guy can lecture at me, but from a cloud? Nah.

It feels like the educational equivalent of making fetch happen.

I actually kind of want to channel my inner Audrey Watters here to reflect on how positively Skinnerian this whole thing sounds. Someone somewhere is building a VR headset that shocks a kid if they close their eyes for too long. You know I’m right.

Anyway, while Joe Oculus there was explaining why I should pay him money to very literally explode my brain for me, I got to thinking about how much power we give technology entrepreneurs in education when they are walking around saying ideas like this with their whole chests. Like. I don’t understand why we don’t look at stories like this and laugh these folks out of the room when they offer us engagement clickers that also take attendance (I didn’t ask) or a productivity score for every student (I didn’t ask) or an AI-graded essay tool (why am I asking students to write an essay I don’t want to read, exactly?). Over and over again, the pitches show that there are never any educators in the room.

Get these doofuses out of the room where we’re trying to do the teaching and learning.

No one wants to die in real life if they die in the game. Literally no one asked for this.