Still, Watters runs deep #EDEN15

Audrey Watters and Maarten de Laat

Education writer and journalist Audrey Watters describes herself as a recovering academic, serial dropout and rabble rouser - her blog also carries the epithet 'trouble maker'. Her involvement in the Hack Education movement derives from her dissatisfaction with current school regimes and her outspoken criticism of traditional education practices has led to her championing alternative education movements such as the flipped classroom, MOOCs and open courseware - and of course, the use of digital learning technologies.

It was therefore with great anticipation that delegates at the 2015 EDEN Conference in Barcelona, gathered to hear her speak. But was she preaching to the converted? Watters certainly modelled the themes of the EDEN Conference - the challenges of expanded learning scenarios. In her speech entitled 'Learning Networks, not Teaching Machines', she talked about the the century old efforts to modernise education and attempts to integrate technology, and then discussed the ideology around networks and learning.

Villemard, c 1910

She used a quote from David Golumbia: 'The network map is not the politcal territory' which traced the word 'network' back to the introduction of the railroads in America, the word now relates to the way people connect and communicate using digital media. Educational technology is not new, she said, but we must avoid purposeful reinterpretation of history. One of the first institutions that was networked was the university, which was the first subscriber to the Internet. She is concerned about embracing globalisation if it actually means the Googlisation of humanity. She showed the famous slide of education 2000, painted by the French artist Villmard, and used it to erroneous interpretation of what technology can achieve. It confirms our beliefs and worst fears that the future of education will be mechanised, and about content delivery, where knowledge is something that must be 'put into' students heads, and reminds us that with each subsequent innovation, we maintain the more traditional, but increasingly irrelevant vestiges of education. More images by Villmard were used to represent content primacy, at the expense of true pedagogy.

Villemard, c 1910

And yet, the students in Villmard's image are actually networked. They are connected by wires to the grinder that dispenses knowledge. They are not isolated from each other in the way the viewer of Edison's film projector is. They are still the recipients of knowledge rather than the transmitters we now know them to be. The web is not distributed evenly, said Watters, and there are many injustices found within it.  We must think about building our technology on the old networks - they don't go away, they are vestiges that remain. We are building our new learning networks on pre-existing and emerging monopolies. This is the political dimension we often conveniently ignore. The control of the network matters. we have to pay attention to the networks - the physical infrastructure and not just the metaphor of the network. Who controls the data? she asked, as this is a question that will increasingly impact upon networked education. Despite the promises we hear that the internet is going to democratise knowledge and learning, we should know that in reality the networks are controlled by massive commercial interest, she warned.

We still think about broadcasting content to people in mass education contexts, Watters complained. This is technological imperialism, she said, and a radical change in pedagogical ideology is required before we will see any true changes in education. When we invoke learning network today, it is naive to think it is not influenced by commercialism. She even went was far as to predict that the web as we now know it will likely be replaced by something else. There is a battle over who controls the network, she said, and educators need to make sure that we build networks in which equity and justice can thrive and be nurtured.

This was a very thoughtful and challenging keynote presentation. She may have left academia behind, but still, Watters runs deep.

Audrey's original notes can be found at this site.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Still, Watters runs deep #EDEN15 by Steve Wheeler was written in Barcelona, Spain and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.