Keynote speech at CIAED Conference, Bento Goncalves, Brazil in October 2015. Focus on access, social justice and innovation.

1. CIAED 2015
Bento Gonçalves, Brazil
28 October 2015
Dr. Alan Bruce
ULS
Dublin

2.  Entering the time of Crisis
 Globalization: the impact of change
 Education and Citizenship
 Equity, Inclusion and Access
 Distance Education and rights
 Architectures of transformative learning

3.  How wrong can you get? Fukuyama and the
End of History (1992)
 Sociologies of dislocation
 The end of certainty: change or chaos?
 Narratives of insecurity and change
 Motivation: departing/arriving/learning
 European dimensions, global issues

4. • Accelerating and pervasive
• Meltdown and re-structuring since 2008
• Devaluation of the public sphere
• Stratification and inequity – issues of social justice
• Labor market transformation
• Mobile capital and global investment linkage
• Right to inclusion – token or real?
• Access, quality and innovation in education
• Generational demographics

5.  End of stable socio-political norms
 Uncertainty, fluid identity and unease
 A world turned upside down
 The poetry of quest – fromYeats to Kavafy
 A deep shiver of guilt – what have we done?
 What have we become?
 The ghosts that will not rest
 End of assumptions about European identity

6.  Jena 1806: Phenomenology of Spirit
 Philosophy meets History
 Theory of the gaze - master-slave dialectic
 Desire, struggle and recognition
 The visibility of the Other

7. The old world is dying.
The new world struggles to be born.
Now is the time of monsters. Antonio Gramsci

8.  Persistence and increase in inequality
 Permanent hopelessness of excluded
 Invisibility and ethnic difference
 Seeking scapegoats and creating victims
 Access means many things….

9.  Mutual interaction or structured exclusion?
 Community values or communal rituals?
 Linkage to realities or past models?
 Shared memories or shared hatreds?

10.  Explosion in communication
 Immediacy of social media
 Learning from difference
 Adapting to innovative linkage
 Enhanced quality of interaction
 Added value from interaction

11.  Learning in chaos: where are we?
 End of history or start of the unknown?
 Hidden lives, silent voices: secret
communities?
 Fractured identities: who are we?
 Values and vision: why do we need
distance education?

12.  Seismic shift in human relationships
 Competitive pressures
 New forms of work organization
 New diversities
 Instant, multidimensional communications
 Quality standards

13.  Constant often unexpected change
 Permanent migration mobility
 Identity and threat: where are we?
 Threat and reaction to threat
 End of welfare: demographic time-bombs
 Knowledge, innovation and democratic
deficits
 Structural imbalances

14.  Ecological crisis and resource wars
 Outsourcing production
 Plural identities - end ofWestphalian
statecraft
 Privatized everything
 Systemic competition for resources
 Embedded difference and restricted access

15. • Urban futures
• Polymorphic media
• Planet of Slums (Mike Davis): hypercities of
the future
• Informal economies
• Casualized employment
• Constant connectedness and information
expansion

16. • Decreasing employee share in national income in all countries
• Labor productivity - up 85% since 1980
• Not reflected in wages - up 35%
• Declining social mobility
• Rising income inequality reflects declining equality of opportunity
GlobalWage Report 2012/13, ILO
Prof. Miles Corak, Journal of Economic Perspectives 2013
We are increasingly becoming a winner takes all economy… over recent decades,
technological change, globalization and erosion of the institutions and practices that
support shared prosperity have put the middle class under increasing stress
Dr.Alan Krueger
Council of EconomicAdvisers & Princeton (2013)

17.  12 m.: numbers with more than $1m. to invest (9,2%
increase since 2011)
 $46,2 trillion: aggregate wealth of this group (10% increase
since 2011)
 Ultrarich (>$30m.) surged 11% (now 35,2% of all millionaires)
WorldWealth Report
RBCWealth Management & Capgemini Financial Services
June 2013

18. • Understanding human aspects behind innovation essential
to design policies to promote economic development and
richer innovation environments.
• Recognizing key role of innovation as a driver of economic
growth and prosperity - broad horizontal vision of
innovation: GII includes indicators that go beyond the
traditional measures of innovation (e.g. R&D)
• Rankings:
Switzerland 1
Finland 4
USA 6
Ireland 11
Brazil 61

20.  What is really going on in our world?
 What will an uncertain future bring?
 Where does digital end?
 Where does human begin?
 What are we learning?
 How are we learning it?
 Why are we learning it?
 What do we value……..?

21. John Henry Newman (1873) The Idea of the University
1. Primary purpose of a University is intellectual and pedagogical
2. Range of teaching within University is universal; it encompasses all
branches of knowledge, and is inconsistent with restrictions of any
kind.
3. The University prepares students by allowing them to learn about
"the ways and principles and maxims" of the world
4.True education requires personal influence of teachers on students.
Clark Kerr (1963) The Uses of the University
1. Modern university is diversified – a multiversity
2. Serves needs of society, economic and cultural
3.Think tank – essential to progress
4. Master Plan for Higher Education (1960) in California

22.  Contradictory and paradoxical process
 Never greater potential - side by side with
increasing disparities of access
 What we think:
 Citizens
▪ Shared knowledge
▪ Participative engagement
 What we have:
 Consumers
▪ Increasing exclusion
▪ Significant problems with equitable access

23.  Terry Eagleton:The Slow Death of the University (April 2015)
 Packaging knowledge
 Destroying arts and the humanities
 Teaching less vital than research – research brings in he money
 Vast increase in bureaucracy, occasioned by the flourishing of a
managerial ideology and the relentless demands of the state assessment
exercise
 Professors are transformed into managers, as students are converted
into consumers

24.  Ubiquity and access
 Innovation
 Universities, Companies, Customers, Communities
 Quality, standards and assessment
 Curriculum or competence: institutional crisis of modern
educational systems
 Freedom, openness and creativity in the modern digital economy
 Openness as global logic based on free and open-source software
 Battles over digital rights management and IPR
 Links between open content, open science and open collaboration
make shared creativity sustainable
 From Information Age to Conceptual Age (Daniel Pink 2005)

25.  Understanding the concept of Open is critical for
future educational policy
 Open is however deeply contradictory
 Open exists in a changing and conflicted world
 It is not enough to be passive observers of this
change – we must engage

26.  Education as both structure and process
 Education systems mirror world and society and
of which they are part
 Education systems as constraining as liberating
 Forum for ideas or market for products? Or
both….?
 Commodification of knowledge
 Impact on education systems (Freire, Illich, Field)
 Impact on work (Braverman, Haraszti, Davis)
 Impact on community

27.  End of linear models of learning
 Cognitive dissonance: what is needed is not
being provided
 Alienation and anomie in a changing world
 Labor market flux and the loss of autonomy
 Adaptability and innovation as norm, not
exception
 Globalized paradigms/fractured community
 Elephants in the room: power and ownership

28. Open educational resources do have an important role to play in
online education, but they need to be properly designed, and
developed within a broader learning context that includes the
critical activities needed to support learning, such as opportunities
for student-instructor and peer interaction, and within a culture of
sharing, such as consortia of equal partners and other frameworks
that provide a context that encourages and supports sharing.

29.  Role of teacher critical
 Resourcing teachers critical
 Managerial models inhibit
 Disruptive behavior and student alienation
 Cost, cutbacks and resources
 Impact of examination and assessment systems
 Technology without meaning

30.  Schools are a subsystem of a bigger educational
polity that includes laws, policies, strategies
 Strong traditions of control – curriculum domination
 Contradictory demands and expectations on
education system
 Intrinsic relationship to labor market unexamined
 Segregation, hierarchy, results: legacies of an earlier
model

31. Education must fully assume its central role in
helping people to forge more just, peaceful,
tolerant and inclusive societies. It must give
people the understanding, skills and values they
need to cooperate in resolving the interconnected
challenges of the 21st century.
United Nations: Global Education First Initiative (2012)

32.  Membership of a political community
 Belonging and engagement
 Rights and entitlements
 Duties and responsibilities
 Constrained by legacy of nation-state
 Cultural minorities and migrants
 Disputed access

33.  Shaped by globalizing process
 Greater access to knowledge, information
and values
 Digital media
 Mobility and migration
 Climate change
 International governance bodies
 Accelerated interdependence
 Respect for pluralism and diversity

34. To enable learners
 To develop a sense of shared destiny through
identification with their social, cultural, and political
environments.
 To become aware of the challenges posed to the
development of their communities through an
understanding of issues related to patterns of social,
economic and environmental change.
 To engage in civic and social action in view of positive
societal participation and/or transformation based on a
sense of individual responsibility towards their
communities.
SobhiTawil (2013)

35.  Awareness of the wider world and a sense of own role both
as a citizen with rights and responsibilities, and as a
member of the global human community.
 Valuation of the diversity of cultures and of their
languages, arts, religions and philosophies as components
the common heritage of humanity.
 Commitment to sustainable development and sense of
environmental responsibility.
 Commitment to social justice and sense of social
responsibility.
 Willingness to challenge injustice, discrimination,
inequality and exclusion at the local/national and global
level in order to make the world a more just place.

36.  Urbanized futures – the second generation
 Permanent exclusion and inequality
 Invisible otherness – frustration and
resentment
 Trajectories of developmental progress
 Policy fractures: assimilation;
multiculturalism; discrimination; integration
 Embedded violence – from trafficking to
revolt

38.  New frameworks of social difference
 Classical formulations
 Challenges and conflict
 Integration or assimilation
 Discovery and engagement
 Intercultural imperatives

39.  Disability: fear, loathing, guilt and shame
 Historic impact of segregation and exclusion
 Sense of impossibility – no alternatives
offered to this population
 Systemic exclusion in all countries
 From Foucault to Laing – analysis of the
systems, structures and methods that
oppress
 Medical and social models

40. In modern society a sense of normality is achieved through the
suppression and exclusion of the abnormal
Foucault, Madness andCivilization, 1964

41.  Recognizing difference
 Accepting difference
 Responding to difference
 Difference is permanent
 Creating opportunity through learning
 Using Distance Education as tool for inclusion
 Managing diversity

42.  Creating shared meaning in uncertain
times
 Providing support and inclusion
 Valuing difference as a critical
advantage
 Shaping futures not reacting to them

43.  Interaction
 Empathy
 Communication
 Knowledge
 Removal of prejudice
 Linked themes: gender, power, violence,
values

44.  Promoting tolerance not enough
 Racism requires policies on diversity,
laws, anti-discrimination measures
 Ongoing issues around cost implications,
ambiguities, resistance, rights

48.  Integrating in civil society
 Paramount importance of labor market
 Citizenship
 Language competence
 Multi-agency partnerships
 Pathway to inclusion

49. • Skillbeck Report (2001)
• Challenges and changes are within institutions
• Changes are ubiquitous
• Changes are systemic
• Changes are radical
• Evolving CorporateUniversities Forum (Istanbul 2012)
• attract, retain and enhance highly skilled employees
• invest in developing a culture of learning throughout the organization
• spread a common culture as engines of strategic change
• ability to promote importance, value and contribution of a learning culture
• ensure integration of HRM systems and policies with learning initiatives
• build genuine partnerships with world-class learning institutions

50.  Developing comfort and expertise
 Reasserting law and justice perspectives
 Developing networks
 Developing knowledge
 Developing competence

51.  Engaging with diverse communities
 Democratic focus
 Community empowerment
 Outreach and validation
 Legislative foundations
 From tolerance to recognition
 Rights are rights for all
 Shared learning
 Acknowledged pasts - shared futures

52.  Flexibility
 Diverse learners/digital immigrants
 Learning outcomes
 Pedagogical design - integrated learning
 Social capital and inclusion
 Visions of excellence

54.  Challenging norms - what is indigenous culture?
 Challenging stereotypes
 Talent, competence and communicative empathy
 Engagement with difference
 Embedded vision
 Recognition - seeing the Other
seeing ourselves

55. Dr. Alan Bruce
ULS Dublin
abruce@ulsystems.com
Associate Offices: BARCELONA - HELSINKI - SÃO PAULO - CHICAGO