But how? Can we somehow reform education using the tools that helped organize the protests in Egypt (Internet Role in Egypt's Protests)? Or are Facebook, youTube, and Google the cages we unwittingly gild?
Wesch asks, "who will organize all of this data," and he answers "we will," followed by a cut to Google (The Machine is Us/ing Us).
Google is a noun. A verb. A corporation.
What Google is not, is "we."
We tell it our deepest secrets and we ask it our important questions. ("Spy on the wife" "saving a marriage" "sexual techniques" "cheating therapy" (They Know All About You).)
And we can spill our souls at the deceptive privacy of our keyboards and completely for free. Because, to paraphrase Chomsky, "we are the product."
It may already be too late to exert control over the changes in some of what Wesch playfully suggests we rethink: privacy, governance, identity, and ethics (The Machine is Us/ing Us). Google's algorithms are the curators of the content we provide. They are quasi-democratic -- more popular content rises to the top, unless it's content Google thinks we shouldn't see. But there are problems with even the democratic curation of content:
- What is popular is not necessarily what is equitable. Democratic curation will reinforce the ideologies already in place.
- Democratically generated information (e.g. wikipedia, quite often one of the first and most popular results of any search) has no provenance to take responsibility for it.
To reform education, we need ideological change. We need to value teaching, inquiry, dissent, and discourse. I do not believe that a system that is essentially a feedback loop for the status quo is going to cause this organic change.
I find it interesting that educational reform started when we failed to launch first into space. i say we blame the Russians for all our educational failures. But it is interesting that throughout our early history that our educational system has tried to be revolutionized. I wish we could go back to the days where foreign societies were trying to keep up with us instead of the US trying to keep pace with the rest of the world.
ReplyDeleteWhere do foreign societies send their students to college? Yes, I agree that ideologically we're behind other nations that are culturally different, such as Finland, where teachers are treated like professionals, failing schools get more money, not less, and collaboration is emphasized over competition. I haven't looked carefully at the claims that we're behind other nations, however. What percentage of the population is represented in those standardized tests, and how are they administered? MA does pretty well compared to the rest of the world (and the rest of the nation). We're not in the downward spiral we're led to believe that we're in. We're constantly deciding that all children can learn things they were never expected to learn before (e.g. algebra). Take heart.
ReplyDelete"What is popular is not necessarily what is equitable. Democratic curation will reinforce the ideologies already in place."
ReplyDeleteWhile I have often thought about this, I have never before applied it to the internet. It makes a lot of sense. But how do we as a society go about changing this? It seems to require conscious effort and when it comes to technology a lot of people, even those who use it every day, still think the internet is "a series of tubes."