Welcome friends, to my new page for pedagogical musings and anti-capitalist rantings all bound up in our collective goals of inquiry and understanding new technological tools in the realm of education. I’ve never before set up a blog. I’ve certainly explored my fair share over the years, but truthfully, these were mostly one-off internet excursions looking for a decent recipe to try, and never lead to sustained engagement with any blog network. The process of setting my own up was easy enough, though frankly, somewhat dull. Of the millions of blogs powered by the WordPress engine, I can’t imagine how many lie dormant mere weeks after they start. WordPress, to its credit, has a fairly intuitive system for organizing everything, changing site themes, and adding content. Then again, given the terms of service which grants exclusive license of all content on these blogs to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, I’m not surprised they want to make it easy to upload information and add to the marketization of access to people.
Though the process of setting a blog up I was struck by two thoughts regarding the usage of blogs. These fall into two distinct but related categories; the effects on students in terms of consensual relationships and dismantling classroom power structures, and the incursion of technology into education on capitalism’s terms.
For students, one concern I have about the use of blogs or tools like WordPress is on effective privacy management and intellectual property protection. As the WordPress terms of service point out, when content is posted to a blog the parent company gains the license to use it as it will. Now, often enough this will mean nothing for any individual blogger in their day to day life, but the idea that suddenly a student’s labour becomes essentially the property of a transnational corporation ought not sit well with educators. Capitalist and colonial education systems already operate as centers for the social reproduction of labour relations, using tools like WordPress takes the mask off and skips a major step by allowing for the direct exploitation of students as workers.
This is doubly concerning when we put it in terms of education around consent. I believe as educators we have a strong obligation to teach consent to our students in all their relationships. Grappling with the use of WordPress and other tools like it (including the newly ubiquitous Google Classroom) means that our consent education must show how capitalist technology relations in education operate on a fundamentally unequal basis. Permissions may be granted for technological use (from parents, but do youth really feel like they can truly consent? Consider peer pressure and the institutional pressure that tech use may be an obligatory part of their time in the classroom) but when the means of education, content production, and content distribution are only accessible by agreeing to let your labour become a source of profit for a tech company, is it really voluntary and enthusiastic consent?
I wonder perhaps if it is not more just for us as educators to take up arms the way the Luddites did 200 years ago. Ought not we try to hack and crash these systems and prevent the marketization and privatization of education the same way the Luddites destroyed looms and millwheels? I, like Ned Ludd and my working class ancestors before do not fear technological development, in fact I welcome it. But I want it working people’s terms, on students’ terms, for the commons, and not for the avarice of capital.