 Hi, I'm Audrey Watters. I'm a writer for Hack Education and joined today with my colleague. I'm Steve Hargidun. I am not a writer for Hack Education, but I'm a huge fan. And as of yet untitled keynote, we'll be discussing, I think we're going to be sort of having a conversation back and forth a little bit about some of the technologies that both enable and actually sort of challenge this notion of open learning with technology. So we thought we'd start with a story. My wife and I have four children and our youngest child is 15 and last year we decided that we were going to do an extended time away from home. So we were signing her up for an online course and we, you know, David Wiley and thought, well, we'll do the open high school of Utah. And Caroline, our daughter, received the materials from the school, including a computer that was provided. And the computer was locked down so that it would only access the school's website. And Caroline went through a number of kind of introductory sessions that were held online that would have normally been held in person. I think maybe they do both there. But it became pretty clear that even though the material was open educational material, it wasn't an open mindset. You know, my sense was I'm not going to lug another computer around just to connect to that one set of resources. And it felt like there was some disconnect for me between the idea of material that can be used openly, licensed as open, versus an open mindset. Sort of the difference between compliance and control mindsets. So I don't know if that's an exaggeration or it seems too strong. But it certainly occurred to us that that created a distinction with regard to openness. I think that this is really something that we're seeing just within the last few weeks, too, with a lot of the one-to-one initiatives, the one-to-one iPad initiatives in particular that are running into the ways in which students want to use the technology that sort of violate policies or expectations of how adults want the technology to be used. And of course Apple isn't, and the iOS isn't known for being an open platform or anything like that. But you still see this notion that technology, we're getting technology into the hands of every student in one-to-one device implementations. But we have these expectations that these devices are actually only going to be used for proper official school-sanctioned activities. And that means limited access to the web, the open web. It means students can't use social networking sites. It means that students can't listen to the music that they want to listen to. They can't watch movies that they want to listen to. It's really all locked down to the content. And in the case of the Los Angeles Unified School District, it's locked down to content from Pearson. So this sort of seeing, I think, really the LA iPad, the problems with the LA iPad initiative are sort of demonstrating that so many things have to be in place. It's not just a matter of the technology being the right technology or the resources being the right resources in terms of openly licensed or open source. But we really have to enable, as you said, a mindset for us to recognize that we trust kids and we want to actually encourage them to have these powerful computers in order to do powerful things with them and give them the agency, I think, to explore that without sort of creating these barriers with it and only letting them sort of explore technology within these very constrained realm. So I think I'd like to suggest that this actually reflects a larger tension that exists within the school discussion. And it was very explicit, if you go back to the 1920s and before then, it was fairly explicit that part of what the role of school was, was to actually take immigrants who were not used to certain kinds of ways of working or operating and kind of bring them into that environment. And we know that story, the school bell story in the factory model. But it was fairly explicit that school existed sort of for two different groups. You had an elite group that were going to govern and then you had a group that were going to be governed. And they were asked to sort of stifle their own personal creativity to be a part of the group that's managed. So it feels like that tension isn't new, right? I think that we tell the story of education being about liberation through learning, that we become intellectually free. But in large part schools haven't existed and by their output don't currently exist to give that freedom to everybody. Is that too dramatic? I mean I think that this is certainly something that we see in terms of social class, right? Jeannie Anion, the education researcher, recently passed away. But she was very good about pointing out the sorts of ways in which low-income students are sort of far more circumscribed by the sort of move to the bell, stay in line, comply, learn to be silent, learn to, you know, only respond when spoken to by an authority figure, versus students that at elite schools and those often, the ones that she said were private schools. Elite private school students weren't sort of controlled by the bells in the same way. They were certainly being thought, you know, being encouraged to be creative, encouraged to find leadership skills. And of course I think that probably most, you know, if you think of the bell curve, most probably are in the middle somewhere. But I think even in the middle we don't necessarily do a very good job of encouraging students to have, to sort of be autonomous, to have agency, to sort of find their own passion and to move forward from there. We're still very much interested in moving them through a preordained curriculum that outside authority figures to cite are important, rather than a learner herself. So I want to actually magnify this and kind of look at it from a larger historical perspective. It feels as though part of what's happening now with the web is it's allowing us to be involved in conversations, great conversations that are important ones through this kind of a medium. I mean they're the brilliance of this, right? I'm on my phone, we're connecting, we're recording, and it will get posted. So if you think about the creation of the United States, it was created as a constitutional republic. The idea was by many who were a part of that, that not everybody should actually have the right to participate, and that full democracy would lead to tyranny. There was a fear of tyranny. So there wasn't actually a belief that democracy, the way we use the word democracy, was the actual ultimate good, of everybody fully participating. And then you get this sort of interesting period after the muckraking journalism that started in the 1890s, where there was this sense that we had too much democracy that we needed to, in order to govern, we actually had to reduce that democratic voice. And you have Woodrow Wilson using propaganda in World War I to get approval for entering the war, and then you've got all this sort of meets propaganda story that you and I love to talk about. And then you get this actually again explicit idea that propaganda helps you to manage in a new democracy. That in the new democracy, you have an elite group who use propaganda and emotions and psychology to manage the crowd. If you retell the story of the 1960s, this idea that there was criticism of the war, there was an openness and willingness to question, the trilateral commission then comes in and says, that's an excess of democracy, our cultural institutions need to clamp down and regain order. Is this actually a really important conversation that we don't often have? Do we really believe in pure democracy? Do we worry that pure democracy leads to a tyranny of the majority? Do we believe everybody's actually capable? That's the story we tell in education? But do we really think that that works? I mean, I think that there are so many sort of political and cultural and social questions around that. I mean, I think that there are ways in which we try to, we do try to foster this notion. It's a very American notion too that anybody who wants to sort of, I mean, I think it's part of the American narrative that we tell, that we're all capable of sort of doing great things and being great people and changing the world. And I think probably if it's really an American story becoming rich or movie stars. But I think that when we think about how other institutions and not just the institution of schooling shake out, I'm not sure that we actually do sort of lower the barriers to participation for everyone. I think there are ways in school in particular, sort of reinscribes prestige, it reinscribes, it does reinscribe the way power works already. And I think that technology is playing and probably will continue to play a really interesting role in that, despite what you talked about with the ability of the web to make great connections across time and space. I think that technology is also sort of, in some ways, we're seeing sort of the sort of fantasy of a Taylorist model for school, right, where you could measure every single thing that happens in the classroom and you could sort of turn the dials in order to make students move through more efficiently through content. We'll call that personalized learning. It sounds nicer than Taylorism 2.0. But I think that that's this other piece of, you know, this other piece of what technology will do because it's also tied to a very strong cultural, economic, political system, this other sort of trajectory that technology is certainly on as well. As much as we could think about it in terms of openness and liberation and agency, I think it very much is, you know, there's the infrastructure for control and infrastructure for surveillance that technology is also part of constructing here. And I think schools play into that, too. I'm really interested in the, you used the word narrative, and I love sort of thinking about what we do in terms of those narratives, right? So you have a, you know, you have an original settling of the United States by people who came here based on religious narrative, being able to worship freely. But that wasn't actually an uncontrolled society. It was a highly controlled religious society, right? The schooling that existed at that time enforced our religious beliefs. But you also have within that sort of Judeo-Christian shaping of our culture this idea of the value of each individual. Then you get evolution in Darwin and you get Freud and you get sort of the pre-skinner behaviorists kind of work, right? This idea that we are, we're not actually sort of uniquely spiritually individual. We are like the animals. We're likely, learning is actually a response to stimulus. So it feels like this is kind of a dilemma of narratives, right? That it's hard for many people to see the religious narrative as a primary narrative. But the secular narrative feels very much like it places us in a position where we don't actually have agency or individuality. How do we reconcile, how do we tell a story that we can all feel comfortable with? I think that, you know, and I think that one of the other stories that I think that we grapple with in the United States in particular is this notion of sort of how do we balance this notion of individual liberty with the notion of creating a country and sort of the notion of a citizenry that isn't just about a bunch of autonomous beings but that actually has sort of caring capacity for one another and that we have a shared national identity and a community, perhaps at the national level, perhaps at smaller sort of geographic local community levels as well. And again, I think this is something that we're seeing that the Internet has potential to foster this piece of community and then it also, I think that, you know, how do we sort of make the trade-offs between the individual and the group and how do we, when we're thinking about group identity, you know, national identity, national curriculum when it comes to schooling, sort of what are the trade-offs then between what matters to the local, what matters to the individual and what matters to the larger voices in the national setting that are sort of, I think, have a larger voice in determining what some of these narratives look like. Yeah, and you've just made a really interesting connection for me, right? Because in World War I, Woodrow Wilson felt like there wasn't going to be time to actually convince people to do what was right. And so you use the psychology of propaganda in order to get to the result that you want. And is that an inherent temptation of institutions? The institutions, go ahead. You're already smiling and you've got a response. No, because I think that we're looking, if we look at what's happening right now in Washington, D.C., there's something about creating crisis, like there's the moment of crisis that I think allows new narratives for better or worse to be created. If you can sort of create a narrative of crisis and create or sort of foster crisis, then I think that that's a particularly powerful time for certain stories to stick, whether they're stories to convince you to go to war in the case of Wilson, or when they're stories about the crisis narratives that we're hearing about school. Schools are broken, so we have to do something, and the louder voices tend to be the ones with deep, deep corporate pockets that have a specific vision about what that something should be. And so there's something, I mean, I do think that there's this moment of crisis that gets, that sort of, is easily both created and then utilized for great political purpose. I think we're seeing that nationally, but I think that we're really seeing that play out around education as well. Yeah, that's so interesting, because you've got this period of time in the 70s with the Trilateral Commission, and then you have this narrative that education is broken, which could be seen as a way of reasserting control, right? And do we really want independent voices? I mean, if you think about our foreign policy, you think about other ways in which we've acted as a country, do we really want people who are journalists and others who are being critical, or does that threaten our sense of maintaining control? Are we going over the edge here? I mean, I think that these are probably always the questions of how power operates, and I think that power operates in lots of interesting ways, not necessarily just those in power want to sort of keep others out of power, but I think that there are sort of nodes and networks of power that work on sort of micro levels that benefit from these things as well. And I think that for me, and I think for you as well, the answer is yes, we do want people to be critical thinkers. We think that the world would be better if more people asked more questions rather than were more compliant. But I think that we sit at a particular place on those nodes and networks. We are making arguments that sort of want to move the world in a certain direction, and I think that we resist, there are forces that resist that for a variety of reasons. So I mean, I think you and I, yeah, that's what we want. I lost your audio there for a minute. I think about three minutes left. And so I really want to move us toward the topic of interest to you. I wonder if you're hearing that phone. Oh, I can't hear your phone. Okay, so I guess the interest for me would be moving us, giving you a chance to kind of talk about data and algorithms and how those movements right now are playing into some of these historical contexts. So this is one of the things that I think, you know, so the book I'm working on right now, Teaching Machines, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about sort of the way in which these stories that we're hearing right now about what computers can do in terms of personalized learning, in terms of sort of more efficient, more automated teaching and learning. So how many of them are predicated on this notion of sort of mass collection of data and then fine-tuning algorithms to be able to deliver content or deliver assessments or sort of offer assessments at a more refined, fine-tuned level. But it all is a mass data collection and the creation of an algorithmic approach to thinking about that. My concerns are several folds. And I think that what's interesting is that we've sort of gone back and forth and tied our questions about education and technology to larger questions in sort of national politics. And I think that the notion of the NSA and their data collection is an interesting parallel here. So if we're going to collect massive amounts of student data, we're not sure what we're going to be able to find from it, but we're pretty sure that we're going to be able to make it be useful in some way. So we have to think about how is this being used for surveillance technology? What sort of predictive policing are we going to create? Who writes the algorithms? Who's evaluating the algorithms? Are those open to be assessed by outside researchers? Or is this really sort of new black box and sort of a new model, a new factory model, one that isn't so much about people working on the machine floor but certainly having students in cubicles and having students interact with computers in such a way that there still is that same sort of mass standardization, even though it sort of talked about in terms of being a personalized, individualized technology, that we really are, I think, the algorithms are sort of not necessarily the place in which we're going to find the sort of... it's not actually going to break us out of some of these old models that many technologists sort of rage against when they talk about what tech can do for learning. So clearly data has value, right? I mean, there are going to be times when you say, oh, I had no idea this was taking place and it's useful and informative. It feels like one of the difficulties with this sort of mass accumulation of data is that it's sometimes wrong, right? So the Deming's famous red bead experiment where the collection of data actually showed something that was not right. So this idea that you have to be really careful who's collecting the data and it really should be collected as closely as possible with the people who are impacted by the measures and results. You teach people to collect data rather than you collect it on them. But then there's this really interesting piece of data traveling with someone and not only does it potentially break our ability to renew ourselves, right? We can make mistakes, we can do different things and if I'm going to get measured by who I was at age 18, that's very difficult. But does it also change our behavior? Does the expectation that someone is watching and drawing conclusions about us mean? I don't check that book out at the library that I want to read. I don't explore the intellectual topic I want to because somebody's watching. I think that this is precisely the case and I think that there's, this is the great argument I think for privacy, is that privacy isn't simply this legal construct. It's really this sort of personal perimeter that allows you some interplay between yourself, between your private self and your public self so that you have room to make mistakes, you have room to be playful, you have room to explore and I think what's so crucial for children is that they have room to create and form their own identity without it always being scrutinized, without it always being measured, without it always being tracked. And I think that that privacy, I mean and I think that we struggle with that in terms of the parent-child relationship. I think there's always tension about how much privacy do children, do we give children in terms of their own physical space, their own ability to form their identity. But I think that privacy is incredibly important in terms of identity formation, the privacy of your thoughts, the privacy of your diary so to speak. The places where you're working out who you are and I am concerned that we are moving forward with technology, not overtly to track and surveil children. That is one of the side effects of this and are we going to have the space for people to figure out who they are, figure out who they want to be, change their mind a hundred times in the course of being from 8 to 22 and that that's okay and that there isn't sort of this, that if there is a digital trail that it's something that the person, the kids could sort of have more control over. I'm not sure if that would be possible. So it seems like maybe a good wrap up here would be that just because we call something open or just because it's accessible and available doesn't mean that it's actually open in the sense that it's not controlling. Yeah and I think that these are conversations that, I mean I think that the open in general is a term that is becoming used so often, particularly in technology spaces. And I think that there is that, there's the connection to specific licenses, open source code and the specific licenses around open source, OER content and the specific Creative Commons licenses, but I think that we have to think about things situated a lot more broadly than that and I think that that's always going to be a struggle. I'm not sure that there's any one perfect definition of openness that we would want to sort of like impose but I do think that we have to ask all the time, is the license piece enough and how can we sort of push culturally on the things that are actually about liberation in the face of control, not just the controlling the code and controlling the content, but actually sort of human, the ability to have sort of maximized human potential and human opportunity. Audrey, it's always a pleasure. Likewise, thank you Steve.