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HE = Highly Exclusionary (education)
- universities restructured as businesses (all justified by the financial crisis)
- creativity at the mercy of business: training knowledge workers and devaluing of critical thinking
- withdrawal of state funding from undergraduate degree programmes in arts, humanities and social sciences = privatisation of English higher education
- push for marketable skills (STEM as national priority).. what's the meaning of vocation?
- student-as-customer model: by paying fees, students should be empowered as consumers, giving rise to better quality teaching and courses on offer reflecting
studentconsumer demand - graduate dream of success and social mobility, which has been persistently sold to middle class youth (mass higher education): in reality, a degree is not guarantee of employment (let alone success, however you measure it) and cost of education grows faster than salaries, inflation etc
- consumerist culture: a larger cultural shift that universities have little to do with, and is similarly experienced in healthcare and other fields that historically were more insulated from market language and orientation
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ME (do I have a fancy acronym for it? Meaningful Education..)
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Students should be encouraged to take ownership of their learning paths and choose their own learning goals
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Community of practice: being physically in the same space, working together with co-learners and educators, and one-on-one mentoring
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Peer-learning: the best way of learning is teaching what you know to someone else
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Creativity is something everyone agrees on, but create what? What sort of creativity are we encouraging? What agenda(s) are we pursuing?
- Critical thinking: challenge industry rather than simply chasing it (or serving its employer's demands)
- Dream dangerously: imagining radically different futures, rather than reskins of existing scams
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open source teaching and learning
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WE (aka the PLAN): how am I going to put the above into practice? What am I going to experiment with?
- OPEN teaching: from lecturer to coach
- Computational Thinking is about using code creatively to solve real-world problems, to break down behaviours in specific and precise ways that can be communicated to other people, and eventually to computers.
- Open-source courseware: freedom to access our course material and re-use it
- http://opendefinition.org/
- but how does this sit with the commercial nature of the institution in which this material was originally produced? with the IP that it contractually claims on it?
- can a Creative Commons licence (attribute, non-commercial) be a good compromise?
- Face2FaceTime: tighter feedback loops
- Walking lectures (ask the street..)
- Engaging with the local community: collaboration with primary schools, encouraging students to get involved in volunteering (eg CodeClub) and student societies
- Self-initiated projects: "what do you want to make? and why?" what is your agenda? what change do you want to see? why do you care?
- Animated gifs
- encourage students to print out their code and visualise their understanding.
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The Academic Manifesto: From an Occupied to a Public University: a case study on Dutch universities but largely applicable to the UK HE
The regime does not really care about high-quality results, which it cannot judge, but rather about performance: the tactically well thought-out and cleverly buffed-up illusion of excellence.
instrumental skills aimed at specific labour markets
By cooperating with business, [universities managements] expect universities will transform their wonderful discoveries into marketable products within a few years. This promise not only exhibits a naive belief in commodified universities delivering immediate economic relief, but also a shocking reduction of social benefit to economic gain.
No more science shops, no public university, no university as a platform for uplifting the people, but instead privatised knowledge embedded in expensive patents, published in unaffordable and exclusively English-language academic journals aimed at international colleagues and businesses.
So, there we are: cowards, beggars, petty thieves and collaborators. Together, we face the Wolf alone.
[As universities] we are not the start of a production line of a profitable gadget factory, but a knowledge commons: a shared, organically growing garden of know-how and wisdom from which everybody may learn according to their needs, and to which everybody may contribute. Our task is to share the produce of this garden and to cultivate it with as many people as possible, not to cultivate standardised minds at the lowest possible cost.
We will tell students that they study to become good scholars and responsible members of society, not for the sake of a highly-paid job at the end of the diploma ceremony. We will once again tell them that they are primarily learners and citizens, not consumers.
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The National Student Survey should be abolished before it does any more harm
... a survey that tells us that the overwhelming majority (86%) of students at all universities are satisfied, and that there is little difference between institutions, actually tells us very little indeed.
Just as high IQ scores tell us more about a person’s ability to pass IQ tests than they do about their intelligence, so the high NSS results tell us more about the sector’s ability to perform well in satisfaction surveys than the quality of what happens within universities.
If university does not leave students at least a little dissatisfied, it means they haven’t been sufficiently challenged or pushed outside of their intellectual comfort zone – and they should ask for their money back.
In certain respects, the NSS is not unlike TripAdvisor, except that TripAdvisor does at least allow the possibility of a response from the reviewee (comment)
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The student-as-customer model allows us to rationalize (actually, rationalizes for us) the cycles of student-loan debt that increasingly appear to mortgage many young graduates’ futures. Such logic also allows us to write off as unwise those students who accumulate large debts on seemingly “impractical” degrees, without acknowledging the larger cycle of recruitment and easy-credit through which such students are convinced to buy into, literally, their university in the first place.
The burden of debt has been shifted onto students.
In the student-as-customer model, students and their parents both begin to ask a “what am I buying?” question. [...] Students, and those who “assess university success,” become fixated on their perception of the end product, a student seated in an office chair, and forget that education is a process, and one that students ought to continue on their own post-graduation.
The problem is not even necessarily in having a student-as-customer model, but in assuming that growth, rather than sustainability and equilibrium, is the only forward motion available to higher education.
The university itself becomes the product, rather than the education that the university provides.
The mentality treats academic coursework as parts within a Fordian, standardized academic assembly line.
If there’s an upside to thinking of students as customers, I think it is that the model reminds us that we and our universities are directly accountable to students.
I view my students, not as my customers, but as my product. I am using the raw material that comes in the door to produce mature, intelligent, critical thinking, creative problem solvers. My customers are society, industry and alumni. [comment]
If students are customers, in that we are accountable to them, they need to be reminded that we are like a gym selling membership. Just being a member won't make you fit! [comment]
I have a problem with a public good that is privately financed with my tuition dollars. The public good ideal is fine when education is publicly financed, but clinging to the status quo by raising tuition is unsustainable. [comment]
I always tell my students that "you may be a student-consumer, but in my class you bought an intellectual gym membership. You hired me as your trainer this term. It will be fun and stimulating, but it will be difficult. By taking my class, you implicitly agreed that you need to lose 10 pounds of intellectual flab, gain 5 pounds of connect the dots imagination muscle, and develop greater core strength at logical argumentation. If that's not for you, there are a thousand other classes you can take. Do the work with me during our three hours together per week, and during your personal at-home workouts, during office hours, and you'll be taking full advantage of the gym membership. Gold star. Boo yah! Show up at class and say "hi" to everyone at the gym, glance at the equipment (the assigned texts), and b.s. your way through the exercises (quizzes and papers) and that colossal waste of money and resources is on you." None of this solves the much bigger systemic issues, of course. Just a finger in the dam and an attempt to make the classroom an important face-to-face experience with these young men and women. [comment]
There is a sense of unease in using this consumerist metaphor. Is the student a customer? Or is society the customer? And student the product? What about education?
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The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education
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Marketizing higher education: neoliberal strategies and counter-strategies
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Teaching philosophy by Paolo Pedercini (aka @molleindustria)
Teachers ought to reaffirm the value of face to face interaction while taking advantage of, and contributing to, the proliferation of educational resources online.
Way too often our undergraduate work reflects an homogeneous upper-middle class background mediated by commercial pop culture: how can we expect them to go beyond it if their entire existences are spent between a dorm and a studio?
Our main concern should be to create compulsive out-of-the-box thinkers, professional disruptors, carpenters of Utopia.
We are interacting with a generation of over-stimulated, attention-deficient multitaskers: our primary challenge as teachers is to fight boredom in the classroom.
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Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things.
In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world are produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old.
That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover.
The class interest of hackers lies in freeing information from its material constraints.
What makes our times different is that what now appears on the horizon is the possibility of a society finally set free from necessity, both real and imagined, by an explosion in abstract innovations.
Production takes place on the basis of a prior hack which gives to production its formal, social, repeatable and reproducible form. Every production is a hack formalised and repeated on the basis of its representation. To produce is to repeat; to hack, to differentiate.
Perhaps there is another class that can pose the property question in a new way - and offer new answers to breaking the monopoly of the ruling classes on property.
Capital produces in its factories not just the necessities of existence, but a way of life it expects its workers to consume. Commodified life dispossess the worker of the information traditionally passed on outside the realm of private property as culture, as the gift of one generation to the next, and replaces it with information in commodified form.
Information, like land or capital, becomes a form of property monopolised by a class of vectoralists, so named because they control the vectors along which information is abstracted.
Hackers do not merely own, and profit by owning information. They produce new information, and as producers need access to it free from the absolute domination of the commodity form. Hacking as a pure, free experimental activity must be free from any constraint that is not self imposed.
The hacker struggles to produce a subjectivity that is qualitative and singular, in part through the act of the hack itself. The gift, as a qualitative exchange between singular parties allows each party to be recognised as a singular producer, as a subject of production, rather than as a commodified and quantified object. [...] The gift of information need not give rise to conflict over information as property, for information need not suffer the artifice of scarcity once freed from commodification.