En attendant la révolution.

I keep rewriting this post in my head.

I don't really know why.

It's getting on my nerves.

It keeps coming out in bits and pieces.




Questions seep up willy nilly.

Who are "we" "educating"?

Who is this "we"?

For whose purposes?

Whose voices are listened to? 

How do they get listened to?

Who are we screwing?

What can we do to enable more equitable change?


I watched parts of a couple of key notes at the Digped lab.

Martha Burtis spent some time talking about 'Domain of One's Own' and unfortunately she got me thinking.

Sean Michael Morris was talking about whose voices need to be listened to and unfortunately got me thinking.

Tressie McMillan Cottom was talking digital sociology  and unfortunately she got me thinking too.

Thinking is dangerous.

I keep asking myself whose interests the "Domain of one's own" serves and whose interests it doesn't.

I keep asking myself whose interests "edtech" serves and whose interests it doesn't.

I can see all sorts of pedagogical justifications for getting students to take responsibility for their own web domain, learning about data and then I stop.

Audrey Watters talks of "Domain of one's own" as being "one of the most important and innovative initiatives in edtech today."

Whose voices get listened to?

I went back and read Audrey's post 'Ed-tech's inequalities' http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/08/inequalities

There was a slide at the end of her post which made me stop and think.

She writes:

"I want to end here on what is a bit of a tangent, I suppose, about blindness – the things in technology we refuse to see.

This is a picture from Baotou in Inner Mongolia. Tim Maughan published a story last week on the BBC website about this artificial lake “filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge” – the toxic result of mining rare earth minerals, used in our modern computing devices, many of which are assembled – at least in part – in China.

That means this toxic lake is a byproduct of education technology. It grows as our fervor for new devices grows. Can we really say we’re architecting an equitable educational future if we ignore this foundation?

This is the great challenge for those of us in education: to address and not dismiss the toxicity. Adding technology does not scrub it away. To the contrary, we need to recognize where and how and why education technology actually makes things worse."

Why is this a tangent?

Why don't we ask such questions first?

Whose voices are silenced so that we may be heard?

I have been collecting resources on techethics on a Pinterest Board.

I shall leave it here for future reference.

En attendant la révolution...