13 Reclaiming Disruption
Karen Cangialosi
Just after returning from Domains17, I started reading tweets from the New Media Consortium 2017 conference (which I didn’t attend), then the transcript from Audrey Watters keynote. And the lurking ghost in my mind materialized with her words:
“No matter the predictions we make about disruption, in time everything in ed-tech becomes indistinguishable from the learning management system.” AW
Of course we want our DoOO project to succeed and for many students to engage. But the fear that the ‘administration’ or the college ‘marketing and communications’ office or whoever, will want to take this project from us and turn it into something else if we become too successful, too visible or too widespread has been haunting me from the beginning.
This ghost has of course plagued others that have come before me. Martha Burtis, in her Domains17 keynote, ‘Neither Locked Out, Nor In, asks: “How do we free our students from the shackles of corporate and commercial Web spaces without creating some new kind of shackle?” As someone who has been employed by an institution for a long time, but considers herself an activist, I am accustomed to working with One foot in, One foot out. We become at least semi-comfortable with this quagmire, we use Trojan horse solutions. (Over the years, my co-conspirators and I have effectively wheeled in a lot of Trojan horses). But only those of us with privilege (like tenure) can even do that. Yet another paradox.
“We prefer to think of ourselves as professors or pedagogues or scholars or students, not as consumers or users.” AW
But my worry about our DoOO project being co-opted by the dominant systems, the consumer-driven forces, feels especially frightening now, because more than ever before, Higher Ed IS A CONSUMER-DRIVEN BUSINESS. Even here, in spite of our designation as a “public” college. Or maybe especially here, BECAUSE of our small, poorly funded public college status with far fewer resources and high student debt (only 8% of our funding comes from the state). So we are fairly low in the higher education caste system (a la Bryan Alexander), and efficiency and productivity drive everything we do now.
And Silicon Valley ideology creeps in more and more every day.
“That is to say in my mind at least, Silicon Valley ideology – libertarian, individualist, consumerist, capitalist – seeks to mediate all relationships: social, professional, civic, familial.” AW
The ideologies that we hope will shape our DoOO project, when we use words like inclusion, connection, community, agency, access, contribution could be undermined, transmuted into things that we did not intend. This keeps me up at night.
“New technologies, and the ideologies that underpin them, have brought the language of efficiency and productivity out of the workplace and into the classroom and into the home – into the realm of reproductive labor. Everything becomes a data-point to be tracked and quantified and analyzed and adju