the (partial) digitization of the analog educational system

When, in the year 2016, in a society the question of whether (and how) “religious education will be taught in schools” emerges as a very significant challenge, then this society is not simply conservative. It is reactionary, retrograde; it has “rotten” in the historical sense, and does not even realize it. And when, furthermore, it cannot (as “state institutions” and as the dominant “social ideology”) even accomplish what it should have accomplished at least half a century earlier, then not only has this society rotted, but it has also become infested with the insects that feed on decay.

Within this suffocating environment, our (autonomous worker) interest in knowledge issues—which include reviewing and analyzing the crisis and decline of the mass, Fordist educational system (its historical obsolescence), but extend far beyond—is a competitive necessity. It is a necessity because nowhere and never have ignorant, conservative, reactionary, historically outdated individuals ever led any revolution, upheaval, or even serious reform. Changing the paradigm of what knowledge is (what should be considered knowledge), how it is acquired, and how it is valued concerns us not merely as a “research subject,” but also as a shaping of the subjective condition of the modern working class. If, among its other duties, our class (or at least some parts of it) fails to reshape its cognitive interests and epistemological orientations according to 21st-century conditions, then it will remain intellectually enslaved. And that may be the worst form of servitude.

The gathering of game over, both in its first phase, when it focused on the relationship between technological changes and the (old) educational model, and subsequently, revealed several basic new data, both from the perspective of contemporary (outside-the-educational-system) methodology of learning (or not); as well as from the perspective of learning content, teaching, knowledge. Indicative titles/themes of public events: “the digitization of memory”, “education in images”, “hackers, the natives of the new educational system”, “myths about knowledge”, “video games: electronic education”, “the allure of the pirate: against intellectual property”, “the completely random death of an educational system”, “algorithm: the mechanization of thought”.

By no means has the “final word” been said at all. We are far from that – fortunately! Moreover, there are other aspects of the (broader) topic “official education in the phase of paradigm change”. One of these aspects concerns the way in which the informational component of the (new) Bioinformatics Paradigm assimilates, either temporarily or permanently (which of the two will be proven in the future) the old educational processes.

Neil Selwyn, professor at the education department of Monash University in Melbourne, in an article of his in January 2016 titled Digital labor in e-learning – notes on the technological restructuring of educational work presents (rather indignantly) some of the changes that are already taking place:

#1. The digital automation of educational work

Algorithms, computational models and other forms of mathematical calculations are now used in a vast range of educational processes that in the past relied on human judgment and professional skill. This includes the use of “predictive analytics” software with duties ranging from hiring new teachers to timely identification of students at risk of failing their courses. In the last twenty years we have witnessed an impressive automation of classroom work, starting from automated grading of written exams and extending to decisions about whether students’ assignments are the result of plagiarism or not.
Faith in mechanized decision-making processes is also evident in the increasing use of “adaptive learning systems” and “personalized education” software that monitor and direct students’ online instruction. These systems clearly represent the displacement of a huge amount of teachers’ work. A company like Knewton proudly claims to have made 15 billion recommendations on what to study for more than 10 million students. The “smartest educator in the world” no longer needs to be human.

#2. The digital “sharing” of educational work

A defining characteristic of digital technology is the ease with which work can be (re)distributed. As services like Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” demonstrate, online work can easily be broken down into micro-tasks that can be completed by dispersed workers for corresponding micro-payments. Following such principles, digital outsourcing of educational work can now be implemented in many ways. For example, some universities outsource the design and development of their digital courses to “virtual interns”¹ who may perform unpaid “hope labor.”² Some professors may outsource grading and feedback on student assignments, as well as other time-consuming administrative tasks, through websites that take on such work on a contract basis.
Similarly, digital technologies allow students to outsource the difficult or tedious parts of their work. The internet has long been a refuge for “essay mills” and other shadow services that offer student assignments for a fee. Extending this logic, students can now pay workers at online companies like “No Need To Study” to take their online courses – navigating content, writing tests, and posting comments in discussion forums whenever necessary.

#3. The digital recycling of educational work

Digital education increasingly promotes the reuse and customization of content. Teachers are pressured to “adopt blending” and engage in “co-creative work practices.” For example, the trend of reusing PowerPoint presentations from other teachers has become a widespread practice in school and university teaching. Consequently, a large number of websites have been created where entrepreneurial educators can sell their best lesson plans and any other digital educational content. As the New York Times enthusiastically supported, such sites foster a “sharing economy where teachers profit.”³
The concepts of authorship and intellectual property are certainly changing as a result of the technological transformation of learning and education. The argument now is that teachers can no longer claim to own their digital educational products, since they are merely “hands for hire” like actors in a movie or theatrical performance. As a result, teachers have reached the point where major online educational platforms prohibit them from accessing content generated from their own teaching. In many cases, teachers have even found material they themselves demonstrably created being shared and sold as the work of others.

#4. The digital measurement of educational work

Digital technologies also support the increasing quantification and measurement of educational work. These processes can take many forms. Online services such as RateMyTeachers and RateMyProfessors⁴ offer students an anonymous environment where they can compare their teachers’ performances in terms of “helpfulness,” “ease,” and their overall impression [“hotness” in the original]. Similarly, the recent trend for “teaching analytics tools” provides educators and institutions with a variety of ways to evaluate the quality of instructors’ work. There is already a thriving market for commercial software programs that allow teachers to receive “real-time feedback” from the classroom. Online surveys are also regularly used by schools, districts, and government agencies to measure “student satisfaction,” “attitudes toward school,” “teacher wellness,” and other parameters.
Furthermore, digital monitoring and recording of educational work has expanded far beyond online services and programs. Organizations such as the Gates Foundation have invested millions of dollars in developing digital video classroom observation as a tool to support teachers in improving their teaching. Other innovations include the use of biometric “embedded pedometers” and self-quantification technologies aimed at measuring student engagement levels and motivation. Such technologies have certainly helped schools and universities finally implement the old business slogan “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

#5. The digital expansion of educational work

Beyond the above examples, perhaps the most important trend is the digital expansion of educational work in space and time. Briefly, digital technology has made it extremely easy for teachers and students to engage with their work on a 24/7 basis, regardless of location or time of day. Through mobile phones, email, social networks, learning management systems and other forms of e-learning, those involved work by adapting their work to their personal conditions and vice versa, rather than to the standardized educational processes of the school or university.
More specifically, there is now an increasing demand for teachers to communicate with their students outside the classroom, anywhere and at any time, to monitor students’ participation in educational activities outside the classroom by assigning tasks, to conduct lessons even when they are not at school and to deal with educational design and administrative and bureaucratic issues outside school hours. Generally, teaching is no longer something that takes place exclusively within working hours. There are now conditions for “endless” processes and “boundaryless” education.

This brief but diagonal overview of the changes in the educational – department – of – education (we distinguish it from the epistemological) is interesting because it is specific. At the same time, however, it describes nothing more than a process of de-skilling and mechanization of two intellectual processes: teaching and learning. As such, it is not original at all; certainly not in the history of capitalism.
Of course, until about ten to fifteen years ago, the dominant idea was that de-skilling and mechanization concerned “manual” processes (jobs), of low social value (and significance). And that, consequently, such processes de facto “made work easier,” made “life better”; they were components of progress; although there was the inevitable cost of some kind of “technological unemployment.” It was a lofty idea held by intellectuals who, on one hand, considered their own jobs secure (and thus their social status given), and on the other hand, never bothered to notice that this undervalued concept always referred to as “manual labor” largely included intellectual work: knowledge, judgment, experiential learning, etc.⁵

The shock is now created as de-specialization and mechanization have advanced the capture of the temples of (formerly) secure and prestigious intellectual work. Teachers are one case, but certainly not the only one. Engineers, doctors, translators (and we assume very soon lawyers) are in the same situation: at the center of the Paradigm Shift and not somewhere high and outside its whirlpools. Old specialties disappear, new ones are created (apparently out of nowhere) only to also disappear/be replaced; and formerly unified intellectual processes are fragmented (this is called Taylorism!) with many of their parts being executed by poorly paid technicians considered “non-specialized.” Selwyn acknowledges this at the end of his article; but he does so as if the end of the world is coming:

…The Ed Tech industry (education and technology) celebrates the fragmentation of the educational process, but these technologies risk causing the complete deskilling of teachers and educators through persistent standardization, the fragmentation of work, and the devaluation of experience. To repeat a previous point, these are not technologies intended to benefit the majority of workers in education…

This is beyond doubt true. Nor was the mass establishment of the railway beneficial to the workers in transportation with carts and horses… We could cite countless similar examples. The initial correct observation does not predetermine, however, the “what do we do”? Let us ask: is this a sectoral, professional issue? Or perhaps not?
For a certain historical period, in the ’80s and ’90s, when triumphant declarations by various experts (and entrepreneurs) about what great things informatics/cybernetics could achieve resembled dazzling fireworks, the cautious/defensive stance was a kind of “closing of the eyes”: assessments and certainties about what they cannot and will not be able to do; since (so the matter went) they had entered the untillable, fluid, and self-improvised fields of thought, senses, and emotions.
Many of the initial declarations were disproven; others proved to be mere propaganda/advertising by merchants… However, the new mechanization advanced at a breakneck pace, often surprising even the merchants of new technologies themselves. What was disproven was the hope/belief that intellectual and emotional processes/work cannot be mechanized. Many, very many, have been left astounded before what informatics/cybernetics (and genetics, and neurochemistry…) machinery (i.e., its operator) can do, in a way that differs only historically but not emotionally from how the old weavers remained astounded before the mechanical loom. The next stance is irritation, helplessness, rejection.

Wanting to analyze (to begin with) and address (later on…) the issue at its core, we distanced ourselves as autonomously as possible from the “sectoral perspective.” From the outset, as it were, of this or that epistemological (and occupational) field, which until recently seemed fortified against its mechanization; not anymore though. Once someone adopts such a distance, the element of surprise, of shock, of “how is this possible?;” remains important but is no longer the only one. One may observe, for example, that within this process of technological restructuring—which is as extensive as any Paradigm Shift⁶—not only “redundant” individuals are being “produced,” at times specialized and reputable, now devalued. An ever-larger part of social relations is being reshaped; of needs; of desires; of capabilities; of incapacities; of perceptions; of beliefs; of fears; of hopes.

And this is simultaneously the strength and the weakness of every Paradigm Change. It is its strength because, in capitalist ways, new social subjectivities and new relationships are created that fit (that is, serve) the new technological substrate/ecosystem. And it is, at the same time, its weakness because this social transformation takes time. In the meantime, fundamental issues that earlier seemed definitively shaped reopen.

One of these is: what knowledge do we want; how do we want to learn; It certainly seems radical and, from a historical perspective, original for such questions to be posed not in terms of authority (first of the church, then of the bourgeois intelligentsia of the 19th century, then of state bureaucracy and capitalist planning in the 20th century) but in terms of social (and we would hope: workers’) questioning. However, the issue is not so original: there is already its anticipation, buried somewhere in the ’70s (or assimilated by the educational neoliberalism of the ’80s and beyond).

They could not be eternal questions; on the other hand, it would be superficial to answer them on the spot. However, they are based on a (labor-oriented, we insist; call it, if you will, social) specific epistemological and learning horizon for the 21st century, beyond mechanization,⁷ where issues such as public education could once again stand firmly on their feet; its terms and methods; ultimately, the abilities and knowledge of those who take on the role of teachers each time.

The idea that the cart of the old, mass, Fordist education can be kept in place, as long as the appropriate reins are put on the steam engine that has since replaced the donkey; the hope that “those who work in traditional education” can save their positions and salaries (their specialization, that is) by remaining more or less (that is: basically) the same as historical subjects, with the controllable addition of some individual digital devices and processes to their toolkit, this idea therefore is short-sighted and doomed to failure.⁸

The other idea, that the transformation imposed from above can and should be answered by a transformation that comes from below, a transformation that will be neither technophobic nor technofetishistic, a transformation that does not ignore certain real possibilities of using the new machines, but will not mythologize/generalize them because this helps commerce, this idea therefore is indeed bold. And it seems almost alien in the social, ideological and moral environment in which we live here.
It would, however, be dynamic and creative in the medium term.

Ziggy Stardust
cyborg #07 – 10/2016

1. They are “learning companies” that organize “digital education” processes remotely, in collaboration with either universities or individual professors. ↩︎
2. “Hope labor”: it is intellectual work, through computers and the internet, that is “offered voluntarily” (i.e. without payment) with the sole goal of creating a “good biography”. ↩︎
3. In this report (September 5, 2015), the case of an English teacher in California was presented, who makes money by selling to other colleagues of hers the “notes” from the private lessons she gives. ↩︎

4. These are sites that draw information about educators from their “presence” on social networks, their publications, electronically recorded references to them by others, etc., in some way “grading” them. The educators here reject any notion of evaluation, but perhaps someday they will face the possibility of it being done electronically – and without their consent… It’s not the best scenario! But there will be professionals – in – education who will either impose it or accept it as self-promotion…

   ↩︎
5. This crucial issue (both epistemologically and politically) was initially presented as a lecture at the game over three-day festival in October 2015, titled Taylor in Silicon Valley: the techno-scientific management of thought. It was subsequently presented in more detail in the series of texts thought and circuit in Sarajevo. The series remained incomplete because we realized it is not easy for someone to follow the sequence of historical events (and analytical reasoning) in “doses”. Therefore, it will be completed and published as a single text, soon. ↩︎
6. At least two others have occurred in the last two hundred years. And each of them has remained in history (not unjustly) as a revolution. They were not revolutions from below. They were revolutions in the ways societies are organized and labor is exploited… ↩︎
7. “Outside of mechanization”: not because it is impossible, not because “it cannot do A or B”; no other illusions! But because we do not want it, there, there, and there, for very specific moral, epistemological, emotional, economic, and ultimately political reasons. ↩︎
8. It is the same as the hope (until the demand) that the donkey drivers of Santorini had, in the early 1980s, that an asphalt road would not be built from the port of Fira to the city, so as not to lose their job, the tours they conducted for tourists. One could invoke a reinforcing multitude of arguments, beyond the occupational one of their abolition: ecological, environmental, etc. Would it ever have been possible? No. Because they were few, they eventually received a kind of “allowance”. And they remained to gradually disappear, working in the meantime occasionally as “attractions”. Like the camel drivers at the pyramids of Giza. ↩︎