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.

Increasingly, it seems like both educational technology companies and our own administrators are interested in outsourcing the judgement part of our teaching to algorithms. I have written about these algorithms before, and my most significant concern with them is this notion of outsourcing something which is, for better or for worse, a bit part of what it means to teach — at least insofar as evaluation and grading goes.

It’s intuitively clear to most of us, I think, that what we use to train an algorithm matters, and that biased content in will result in biased content out. But recent research into algorithmic recommendation suggests that the mechanism itself, not simply the content used for training it, can be the source of bias. This is especially dangerous in a culture that pretends at the neutrality of algorithmic tools for it own convenience.

Perhaps the greatest source of harm is that the illusion of neutrality algorithms have can be exploited in attempts to roll back protections against discrimination. Appeals to the neutrality of algorithms as a cover for discriminatory outcomes has become a fairly common trope.

Catherine Stinson, Algorithms Are Not Neutral

The truth is that I think a lot of learning analytics are pointless but hopefully largely harmless at the level of collection (I’m talking, like, who clicked where in the Learning Management System stuff), but I’m still troubled that we hand so much data over to faculty without any kind of training on how to make use of it. I give this maybe-trivial example all the time, but if I can track when my students do their homework, and I have an in-built bias for morning people (because of our inherent superiority, obviously), how do I ensure that doesn’t impact my evaluations — and is anyone checking?

But that becomes much less trivial when what is given to faculty moves out of the realm of data and into the realm of judgement. For example, some tools profess to tell us what kind of a student someone is based on this kind of data and some kind of secret sauce algorithm. So we get told the student who submits all their assignments one minute before the deadline is in trouble or in need of some kind of intervention when what they maybe just are is busy.

Of course, the ideal is for us to know our students, so we know when someone’s behaviour changes significantly or what pressures are weighing on them. But of course, most of us don’t work at institutions where that is possible, because we design universities not for learning, but for scale. 300-student lectures and precarious faculty teaching eight sections across three universities to make ends meet. These are not the conditions where it is possible to know our learners. And so, instead of fixing the real problems, our senior leaders are drawn to shiny technological solutions.

Let’s outsource judgement.

I don’t love any kind of learning analytics, but I do see a world of difference between giving faculty the means to micromanage or microanalyze student behaviour — an ill-advised zero-sum game — and giving faculty a label on a student, whether that label is “at risk” or “strong collaborator” or “solitary worker.” I worry that once that label is heard, it’s hard to un-hear.

And then there’s the question of where those labels go. It would be one thing if they were course-specific, but what if that label gets to the next class you are taking before you do? Listen, in elementary school, a teacher read the roll and looked directly at me and said, “Oh no. Not another little Gray.” My big brother’s performance as a student prejudiced that teacher about how I would be in her class. (Sorry to throw you under the bus, Simon.) As it was, she was wrong about who I would be as student in a different course, but we never got along after that. Indeed, her preconception reframed who I was and how I behaved. How do algorithmically-defined labels on students circumscribe them any less than that?

And of course, as more enterprise-level tools masquerade as teaching and learning tools, we should ask if this data captured by Microsoft and LinkedIn and these other corporate-first products we’ve invited into our classrooms is going to follow our students into their working lives. And whether they have the right to make mistakes, to start again, to fail — all things we’re supposed to make room for as educators. And when all else fails, do these tools give students the right to be forgotten?

I always caution faculty that we should be mindful of what data we ask for, because once we have it, we become responsible for it and for its ethical use. When in doubt, don’t look at it. And I think that’s doubly true of the algorithmic judgements that are increasingly sold to us as some kind of neutral truth. The algorithm ain’t neutral, and neither is the judgement.

Just don’t look. It’s not radical, it’s not transformative, and it’s not the whole answer. But it is a start. When in doubt about what you will do with the information and how you will make ethical use of it, just don’t look.

I am going to start this post by pointing you to someone brighter, smarter, and more coherent today, because Tim Fawns theorizes everything I am about to rant about in his thoughtful “An Entangled Pedagogy.” Honestly, you can read Tim and skip the rest of what I have to offer here.

But if the ravings of a social media addict are more your speed, please, pull up a chair.

Okay, so the conference scene has been wild these past couple of weeks, if by wild you mean the silent nightmare of watching people talk about accessibility in spaces that are violently inaccessible to disabled people or really anyone who isn’t in denial about the pandemic we are living through, but Ann Gagné has you covered on that analysis. But it was also wild because there were a bunch of overlapping teaching and learning discussions happening, and in so many of them — at least the part of the discourse that filtered onto my corner of Twitter, anyway — the idea of “pedagogy before technology” kept coming up, as in we must approach teaching and learning from a pedagogy-first perspective (as opposed to, presumably, a technology-first perspective, which for the record no one is suggesting).

This is one of those phrases in education that we are encouraged to repeat without unpacking. It is a very popular concept in teaching and learning centres, especially those without a particular interest in the digital, because it asserts that true pedagogy is this thinking that happens separate from and in advance of our engagement with the sullying influence of technology.

It is not a phrase I have a great deal of respect for, not least because it seems to me that at least thirty percent of the time I encounter it, the person saying it acts like they are sharing some shattering new insight. I think part of the appeal of this phrase is as a rallying cry for folks who think a certain kind of way about education to find each other. Signals and signposts are necessary, but —

The Wikipedia definition of a thought-terminating cliché is actually excellent:

A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} Its function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, ending the debate with a cliché rather than a point.^[2] Some such clichés are not inherently terminating; they only become so when used to intentionally dismiss dissent or justify fallacious logic.^[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9

We are supposed to accept “pedagogy before technology” because we are supposed to accept prima facie that pedagogy is good and technology is less good and that the two operate in separate realms. It ends an argument I’m not interested in ending: namely, it defines a supposed hierarchy in how we think about the arrangement of our thinking about teaching. But if we think about it for even a second, surely it’s obviously untrue.

Technology shapes my pedagogical choices every single moment. If I walk into a classroom and there’s a whiteboard — or more frighteningly, if I’m expecting a white board and there isn’t one — this shapes my pedagogy. If I arrive in class to find that not one student has brought paper or pens to class, this shapes my pedagogy. These technologies are ubiquitous and non-digital, so we don’t think of them as technologies, but they impact our teaching and learning in myriad ways. It’s asinine to pretend otherwise.

I’m not being intentionally obtuse here. I get the intention of the phrase, that the technology we have access to shouldn’t drive our pedagogical choices. I understand that premise: I just don’t buy it. To me, the two are so deeply intertwined and the only reason to hold up one over the other is ideology.

The truth is, as Tim points out in the article linked above, when we assert pedagogy first, even as we do it to eschew a kind of technological determinism, we are suggesting that technologies are neutral, waiting to be folded into any pedagogy. That’s simply untrue, but it’s also dangerous: imagining that technology is unproblematically being led by pedagogy because we will it to be so is denying the power of algorithm and analytic to impact and shape practice. If you are thinking critically about the technological tools you are using in your classroom, you can’t put it last in your analysis; you need to be clear-eyed about the changes the technology makes to your teaching. Because it does.

The LMS circumscribes your choices; the learning curve on any tool is access-limiting; the choice of video or audio or text has an impact on the user. Considerations of these factors happens alongside pedagogical planning, not as an afterthought — if we’re doing it right. There’s simply no way to engage in critical digital pedagogy if you always already think that technology is on the backfoot.

“Pedagogy before technology” comes from a good place, but it lacks nuance and it also lacks faith in our colleagues to be able to have complicated conversations. It’s not “pedagogy before technology.” It’s “technological considerations need to be made alongside pedagogical ones because ultimately the learner experience cannot extricate one from another,” but then I’ve never found myself accused of constructing my own thought-terminating clichés.

That’s not to say I don’t think open source projects matter or that I don’t think open source folks do good work in the world: it’s not that at all. It’s just that I increasingly see a rigid ethos of open — open at all costs — as working against other goals I care about, particularly when it comes to questions of equity and social justice. What can and should be “open” in a strictly governed CC-0 sense of the term doesn’t always intersect with the way I think about access or safety or care. But I also don’t think something has to be big-O Open to be open. Full credit to the Open at the Margins project for opening my eyes to this complexity.

So open matters to me and informs my work as an educational technologist — a lot. But not more than equity and access. Reading Jim Groom’s post last week took me to Martin Weller’s post where he writes,

I have no evidence for this, but my experience suggests a lot of new ed tech people are driven by values, such as social justice, rather than an interest in the tech itself.

It me. Except, not quite. I do like technology, very much, and always have. I went to computer camp for many summers as a kid in the early 90s — a time when that was even more patently uncool than it would be now. I learned how to build extensive MU* worlds and learned basic Java and HTML and CSS and Flash. I’ve always enjoyed the what of technology: what can we build, where can we go. The “we” there is important, because as much as I delight in the what of technology, I’ve never been able to sustain much attention or focus on the how. So for me, the “we” is finding myself within a team very smart folks whose brains apply themselves effectively to the how while I busy myself with plans for the what.

But as the what becomes ever more ubiquitous, it’s increasingly true that my interest and attention is not on the what or the how anymore, but the why: why this technology, why this company, why this application. The zeal I once felt for the what, and some of the awe I maintain for the how, has been subsumed by the persistent question of why — and a nagging suspicion that edtech as it has been allowed to run amok through our institutions is doing more harm than good.

Of course edtech as it was been allowed to run amok through our institutions is very far, indeed, from the idea of open that I sat down to write about today.

So it goes, I suppose.

Speaking of edtech, Alan Levine had a post a couple weeks back that resonated with me as he draws a line (not to put words in his mouth) between the edtech that is sold and the edtech that is built.

I think we have let slide away, be it in a cloud of social media like button clicking, what I always saw as key of a conceptual understanding of how the web works. I see it in what once have been created on a web site is pushed out as a Google Doc or rather than using WordPress I see resources cranked out as Pressbooks. Very few want to know the innards of view source, much less how HTML, CSS, and (boogie man) Javascript can do things not even imaginable in CodePen, where it is all there to inspect. And they will all leave the room if you mutter “Github.”

Author’s note: absolutely nothing on the web spooks me more than Github.

All that pursuit years ago of “digital/web literacy” seems in vain, and about as much interaction I seem to witness is liking/retweeting.

There is a price paid for the Convenience of not having to know how the web works, to make things “easier” to do. Yes, tasks might be easier, bur now you are limited in what you can do to what the tech builder gives you.

I accept complicity and a certain amount of guilt for these truths. If I am perfectly honest, I don’t want to do hard things or at least thing I imagine to be hard. And there is a line to walk between making good digital tools accessible and engaging for people who may not have much interest in The Digital (or time to adopt new skills, precarious and overworked labour in higher ed being the watchword of the moment) and maintaining an open commons — and valuing such a thing. The encircling of the commons feels more and more like yet another indication of the neoliberal ethos at play in higher ed and everywhere, and it exploits the same folks that every other neoliberal “innovation” (brb, barfing forever) exploits.

So when I say “open as in hearts, not open as in source,” there’s a lot I could be accused of handwaving away. Much of it, conveniently, stuff I am not good at. I can own that.

But I think there’s big value to think about the breadth and depth of possibility in the word “open,” outside of its genesis, and to think about what open education means to people who don’t have a foot in that world at all.

An example. When needs are placed in competition for funding, as they often are in this austerity++ moment, I frequently hear a reported tension between the movements for open education within universities and the movements for reconciliation and decolonization. The tension is that some Indigenous ways of knowing are not open for uninformed reuse by settler scholars, and the very particular drawing of lines around traditional knowledges is a necessary act of boundary setting for people who the academy has exploited for many generations. If “open” can only mean a CC-0, open at all costs, remix or else ethos, then yes. It is very simply and specifically and by definition and design incompatible with the urgent needs of reconciliation. But if “open” can mean something broader — an ethos of access, of equity, and of recognizing necessary limits of openness to facilitate justice — then open can absolutely be in conversation with reconciliation. And should be, to remain relevant to all learners.

I am not the first person to think these thoughts (though I think “open as in hearts” is pithy af; if there’s one thing I am here to offer the movement, it’s a turn of phrase). I noted the Open at the Margins collection earlier, but three essays in particular from it that shaped my thinking here:

• sava saheli singh, “The Fallacy of Open.“
• Tara Robertson, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Open Research and Education.“
• Suzan Koseoglu, “Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley.”
• Maha Bali, “Openness in Whose Interest?“

I have been away from blogging for some time — to reflect the CogDog’s point earlier, I tend to prefer the ease and ephemerality of a Twitter thread these days — but I’m remembering the messiness possible on the blog page that is not quite like any other writing. So this is my offering on a Friday: some messy thoughts about whats, hows, whys, extended always open heartedly.