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Critically questioning educational innovation in economics and business: human interaction in a virtualising world
Professor Richard Hall
@hallymk1 [email protected]
EDinEB, University of Brighton // 3 June 2015
1. Educational innovation reveals an entrepreneurial reconfiguring of the idea of the University.
2. Educational innovation is a crack through which we might analyse the transnational interests that drive value production and accumulation.
3. In the face of socio-economic and environmental crises, is it possible to reclaim the organising principles for the curriculum as a more meaningful form of educational innovation?
I will say nothing about climate change and the IPCC’s recommendations.
I will say nothing about liquid fuel availability and peak oil.
I will say nothing about the emotional crisis of sociability and anxiety inside higher education.
The triple crunch is for another day.
higher education, innovation and the secular crisis
Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle Special Report provides strategists and planners with an assessment of the maturity, business benefit and future direction of more than 2,000 technologies, grouped into 119 areas.
Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps the Journey to Digital Business. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2819918
personal tutoring; peer mentoring; internationalisation and MOOCs; learning analytics and retention/progression; teaching excellence
framework; learning gain and the HEAR; NSS and especially assessment and feedback; DSA; employability and the FEER ; scholarship and the
REF; and on; and on; and on.
Digital Marketing: Nexus of Forces (mobile, social, cloud and information); consumers participate in marketing efforts to gain greater social connection, or product and service value.
Digital Business: convergence of people, business and things; physical assets become digitalized alongside already-digital entities, such as systems and apps.
Autonomous: leverage technologies that provide humanlike or human-replacing capabilities; autonomous vehicles or cognitive systems.
Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps the Journey to Digital Business. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2819918
Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps the Journey to Digital Business. http://gtnr.it/1swZR7r
Office of Educational Technology. 2015. Ed Tech Developer’s Guide. https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/
Office of Educational Technology. 2015. Ed Tech Developer’s Guide. https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/
Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.
Marx, K. 2004. Capital Volume 1, p. 493.
It took both time and experience before the workpeople learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.
Marx, K. 2004. Capital Volume 1, p. 554.
Value emerges as a form of sociability (as capital) from the unity of three circuits. It is formed of moments of the circulation of money, of production, and of commodities. The self-expansion of value is “the determining purpose, as the compelling motive.”
Marx, K. 1885. Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 4.
Accumulated value, and the power that flows from it, means that other forms of human or humane value in the production of commodities are marginalised.
Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 25(2): 11
Summers and Krugman (pace Hansen)• systemic stagnation (population, education,
inequality, debt)• failure of monetary policy• below-trend aggregate demand/growth, under-
investment• Total Factor Productivity, Human Capital Theory,
innovation, entrepreneurialism, family
Secular crisis 1
Michael Roberts• the heart of the issue is the production
for profit by the private owners of the means of production
• deleveraging; liquidation; productivity; profitability
• production for profit aims constantly to reduce the labour-time required for the production of commodities, including labour-power
Secular crisis 2
Harry Cleaver• counter-measures cannot resolve the
underlying problems of the system, rooted in expansion and accumulation
• counter-measures undermine capitalism’s legitimacy
Secular crisis 3
“a new disease… technological unemployment.”
“This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”
J.M. Keynes. 1930. Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.
social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
J.M. Keynes. 1930. Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.
Education markets are one facet of the neoliberal strategy to manage the structural crisis of capitalism by opening the public sector to capital accumulation.
Lipman, P. 2009: http://bit.ly/qDl6sV
Digitization is reducing labor content of services and products in an unprecedented way, thus fundamentally changing the way remuneration is allocated across labor and capital....
Mature economies will suffer most as they don't have the population growth to increase autonomous demand nor powerful enough labor unions or political parties to (re-)allocate gains in what continues to be a global economy.
Gartner. 2013. Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2014 and Beyond. http://gtnr.it/17RLm2v
The difficulty of living in a society dominated by value necessarily leads to the creation of all sorts of ideologies to explain the suffering caused by such a society and that enable the subjects of labour to project onto others the qualities that they are forced to expel from themselves.
[e.g. luddite, inefficient, digital immigrant, uncreative, geek, nerd]
Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 25(2): 11
higher education, innovation and the rule of
money
the sociability of academic work is altered through educational innovation:
1.for exchange > use [invested]
2.university reorganisation = efficiency + productivity
3.a structural adjustment policy that reshapes the relationships between academics and students
Willetts, D. 2013. Robbins Revisited: Bigger and Better Higher Education. London: Social Market Foundation. http://bit.ly/1mhl2By
Byrne, L. 2014. Robbins Rebooted: How We Earn Our Way in the Second Machine Age. London: Social Market Foundation. http://bit.ly/1q7P8OF
Rizvi, S., Donnelly, T., and Barber, M. 2013. An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead. IPPR. http://bit.ly/1jA5Dzo
Across the higher education system, institutions are using technology in innovative ways.
Yet conventional universities no longer hold all the cards on how the higher education market develops.
Although MOOCs are still at a relatively early stage, they are evolving fast and may have the potential to tackle some particular challenges – such as an apparent mismatch between the supply and demand for high-level computer skills.
Willetts, D. 2013. Robbins Revisited: Bigger and Better Higher Education. London: Social Market Foundation, p. 69. http://bit.ly/1mhl2By
we need a higher education system that helps to build better jobs and equips people with the skills for high skilled, high value-added, non-routine jobs.
It reminded me of something blunter that Paul Hofheinz, President of the Lisbon Council said to me...: “if we want to live better than others, then we will have to be better than others.”
So our goal is bold and simple: to build a bigger knowledge economy
Byrne, L. 2014. Robbins Rebooted: How We Earn Our Way in the Second Machine Age. London: Social Market Foundation, pp. 27, 29.
open data: accountability and predictive consumerism
money: efficiency and the student experience
competition: new providers and innovation, entrepreneurialism and cost-efficiency
IPPR. 2013. Securing the future of higher education. http://bit.ly/19fiLpt
Lord Young, adviser to the Prime Minister on small business and enterprise: http://bit.ly/1l5iY3Z
The Coalition government has quietly put in place a series of measures designed to support a new performance metric: repayment of loans by course and institution. It could become the one metric to dominate all others and will be theorised under the rubric of ‘human capital investment’.
The Small Business, Enterprise and Employability Act received Royal Assent at the end of March 2015. Section Six of the bill is titled ‘Education Evaluation’…:
[The measures] will also help to create an incentive and reward structure at universities by distinguishing the universities that are delivering the strongest enterprise ethos and labour market outcomes for their students.
McGettigan, A. 2015. The Treasury View of HE: variable human capital investment. Political Economy Research Centre.
At Pearson, when we ask ourselves how we can help to achieve that goal of doubling the amount of really high value learning, we think about four things:
being more global; being more mobile; thinking holistically; being absolutely obsessed with learning outcomes
“building an ever-wider range of bigger and more complex standalone products and services to participating in more open, interoperable educational ‘ecosystems’, centered around learners”
Pearson’s Five Trillion Dollar Question: http://bit.ly/1iaRaMp
Transnational associations of capitals
Major Players in the MOOC Universe. Chronicle of HE.http://bit.ly/1a2lqVv
Bain and Company (2012, http://bit.ly/11h3YsD):
• seize opportunities to use exportable services to increase revenues and profits [MOOCs]
• upgrade low-tech products into premium consumer goods and services [curriculum; learning analytics]
• services bound by physical geography made portable [mobile]
• leading universities in the advanced economies can accelerate the training of home-grown specialists in emerging economies
• by importing the talent of highly-skilled professionals from companies in developed markets, businesses in the emerging markets will not need to wait a generation for their own education systems to produce a skilled workforce
Educational innovations sold to higher education as personalisation, or retention, or employability, or whatever:
•in response to the development of a world market;
•making previously marginal sectors of the economy explicitly productive;
•as a way of leveraging the ratio of the total surplus-value produced in society to the total capital invested; and
•as a revolutionising of the means of production.
it is impossible to understand the role of the University without developing a critique of its relationships to a transnational capitalist class
pace Robinson, W.I. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. Johns Hopkins UP.
a note on educational innovation and the colonisation of the soul
I know I have to come right out and say it, because very few people in education technology will: there is a problem with computers.
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.
Watters, A. 2015. Men Still Explain.
1. Educational innovation = social forces in struggle + need to overcome temporal/spatial barriers to accumulation
2. Secular control: the power of transnational capitalism over the objective, material reality of life = reinforced technologically and pedagogically
3. To argue for emancipation through educational innovation is to fetishise technology and to ignore the relations of production
educational innovation and our social forces of
production
the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital [machinery].
Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse. London: Penguin.
As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised concept of the knowledge society and engage in teaching, learning and research only in so far as we can re-appropriate the knowledge that has been stolen from the workers that have produced this way of knowing (i.e. Abundance).
In the society of abundance the university as an institutional form is dissolved, and becomes a social form or knowledge at the level of society (i.e. The General Intellect).
It is only on this basis that we can knowingly address the global emergencies with which we are all confronted.
The University of Utopia. 2015. Anti-Curriculum: A course of action. http://bit.ly/1qgEq8C
the possibility of struggle and emancipation lies in the autonomous organisations that exist within and between both the factory and the community
with a focus on the forms of labour and the exertion of “working class power… at the level of the social factory, politically recomposing the division between factory and community.”
Cleaver, H. 1979. Reading Capital Politically, University of Texas Press: Austin, TX, p. 161. http://bit.ly/Y3w2Pf
Collective work is one of the cements of autonomy, whose fruits usually spill into hospitals, clinics, primary and secondary education, in strengthening the municipalities and the good government juntas.
Not much that has been constructed would be possible without the collective work, of men, women, boys, girls and the elderly.
Zibechi, R. 2013. Autonomous Zapatista Education: The Little Schools of Below. http://bit.ly/19XfrAF
inside
outside
inside and outside
• academics and activists• a network of learning groups designed to promote
political-economic literacy• democratise discussion over how and why our
society is organised, and what can be done• to cultivate critical political economic literacy• concrete social action
• all knowledge is co-produced• no teachers or students: self-critical scholarly
communities• open, critical dialogue is foundational
• all feel entitled and able to teach• all feel safe, respected, and supported
Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.
We recommend to the working men to embark in co-operative production rather than in co-operative stores. The latter touch but the surface of the present economical system, the former attacks its groundwork.
Marx, K. 1866. Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council: The Different Questions. The International
Workingmen's Association.
Is it possible to innovate against the rule of money?
What does this mean for the governance, funding and regulation of both universities and the curriculum?
Is it possible to define a framework for the common ownership of educational products, assets and commodities?
Might the democratic governance of the curriculum be a transitional moment in the process of articulating alternatives?
Are open education, peer-to-peer education, copyfarleft, the global educational commons and critical pedagogy points of departure?
That learning process comes easiest to those of us who also believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students.
To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.
bell hooks. 1994. Teaching to Transgress, p. 13.
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