This document discusses the need for radical openness and critical examination of educational technologies. It argues that tools are designed by people with certain pedagogies in mind and can ensure compliance over learning. Radical openness requires uncomfortable discussions and relationships over standardized tasks and observation. We must consider what students value and how they learn, not pre-determine their environment. While some projects promote student agency, hierarchies in education are institutionalized; true change requires advocating for students in their work.

1. Radical Openness
and Critical Digital Pedagogy

2. Increasingly, the work of education is activism more than teaching.

4. “To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our
students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions
where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.”
~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

5. In the Milgram Experiment, Stanley Milgram asked a “teacher” (the
subject of the experiment) to shock a “learner” (an actor) for getting
wrong answers on a simple test. An “experimenter” (working with
Milgram) would order the teacher to give increasingly powerful shocks,
and more often than not, the teacher complied. The study is not
without baggage.

6. Milgram describes the device as “an impressive shock generator. Its
main feature is a horizontal line of thirty switches, ranging from 15
volts to 450 volts, in 15-volt increments. There are also verbal
designations which range from SLIGHT SHOCK to DANGER-SEVERE
SHOCK.” I see glee in Milgram’s language (“impressive”), something
theatrical in the excess (“thirty switches”), and a fastidiousness in his
attention to detail in reporting all this.

7. The subtler and more intricate or inscrutable the mechanism, the
more compliance it generates—because the human brain fails to
bend adequately around it.

8. Tools are made by people, and most (or even all) educational
technologies have pedagogies hard-coded into them in advance.
This is why it is so essential we consider them carefully and critically—
that we empty all our LEGOs onto the table and sift through them
before we start building. Some tools are decidedly less innocuous
than others. And some tools can never be hacked to good use.

9. Remote proctoring tools can’t ensure that students will not cheat.
Turnitin won’t make students better writers. The learning
management system can’t ensure that students will learn. All will,
however, ensure that students feel more thoroughly policed. All will
ensure that students (and teachers) are more compliant.

10. In his book Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram coins the term
“counteranthropomorphism”—the tendency we have to remove the
humanity of people we can’t see. These may be people on the other
side of a wall, as in Milgram’s experiment, or people mediated by
technology in a virtual classroom.

11. When digital courseware reports how many minutes students have
spent accessing a course, what do we do with that information?
What will we do with the information when we also know the heart
rate of students as they’re accessing (or not accessing) a course?
How can teachers see courses as more than a series of tasks and
students as more than rows in a spreadsheet?

12. Ranking. Norming. Objectivity. Uniformity. Measurement.
Outcomes. Quality. Data. Performance. Metrics. Scores.
Excellence. Mastery.

13. Photo by flickr userVictoria Pickering
Why do we attempt so often to resolve this...

14. Into this?

19. “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine … If it is of
such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to
another, then I say, break the law.”
~ Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

20. Radical openness isn't a bureaucratic gesture. It has to be rooted
in a willingness to sit with discomfort. The learning management
system is not a space built for discomfort.

21. Radical openness demands the classroom be a space for
relationships and dialogue. Far too many tools we’ve built for
teaching are designed to make grading students convenient—or
designed to facilitate the systematic observation of teachers by
administrators. These are not dialogues.

22. We need to critically examine our tools, what they afford, who they
exclude, how they're monetized, and what pedagogies they have
already baked in. This requires we begin with a consideration of what
we value, the kinds of relationships we want to develop, and how
humans learn.

23. We shouldn't pre-determine the shape of a student's learning
environment before that student even arrives upon the scene.

24. bell hooks means something very specific when she talks of
Radical Openness, and so far the Open Education movement has
failed to tread that particular water.

25. hooks writes, “for me this place of radical openness is a margin—
a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary.
It is not a 'safe' place. One is always at risk. One needs a
community of resistance.” For hooks, the risks we take are
personal, professional, political. When she says that “radical
openness is a margin,” she suggests it is a place of uncertainty, a
place of friction, a place of critical thinking.

26. “We act—at our peril—as if 'open' is politically neutral, let alone
politically good or progressive. Indeed, we sometimes use the
word to stand in place of a politics of participatory democracy.”
~ Audrey Watters, “From ‘Open’ to Justice”

27. Domain of One’s Own is a project that gives all University of Mary
Washington students, faculty, and staff the opportunity to get a
domain name with hosted web space. The domain and web space
are free for the time they’re at the University.

28. “To sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its
colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his
hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is
the most abject treachery.”
~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

29. Even a system that invites subversiveness, like Domain of One's
Own, can't single-handedly dismantle the institutionalized
hierarchies of education.

30. Teaching is always a risk. Learning is always a risk. But that risk is
not distributed evenly. A gay male administrator experiences the
classroom differently from a black teacher, a disabled staff
member, or a female student.

31. With a project like Domain of One's Own, supporting student
agency means advocating for students as they make choices
about their own work—the what, when, and also whether.

32. “Until students see this domain as a space that rewards rigor and
experimentation, it will not promote student agency … The
domains project isn’t revolutionary to the traditional classroom,
but it is revolutionary to a classroom reimagined around public
scholarship, student agency and experimentation.”
~ Andrew Rikard, “Do I Own My Domain if You Grade it?”

37. “We often ignore the best resource for informed change, one
that is right in front of our noses every day—our students, for
whom the most is at stake.”
~ Martin Bickman, “Returning to Community and Praxis”