Category: Reflections

This week comprises three presentations on distinct but related topics. The first to discuss is Bonnie Stewart’s presentation on Datafication.

Sometimes a good chorister enjoys being preached to. Stewart’s talk on datafication outlines many of the ways that the reduction of lives into data which can be analyzed, commodified, and sold is used by the powerful to exert their control. A lot of these ideas are familiar to me, and the lens Stewart takes towards the social influences they cover is quite similar to that which I try to apply in my own understanding of current affairs.

The issue of the reductivity of data is particularly impactful in EdTech, where a primary purpose of a lot of educational technology is improved ability to surveil the progress and activities of students, which can grant a useful level of detail or play into a “teach to the test” mindset around maximizing educational practice towards whatever benchmark can be easily measured. It should not go unsaid that systems are built with purpose, and the benchmark a system measures can be designed around pushing the interests of the unelected heads of large companies whose interests may or may not align with societal well-being.

A lot of conversation around datafication of educational practice calls to mind Goodharts Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Having one number be a target allows for enormous exploitation to make that number go up, which can be divorced from genuine improvements. The most famous example is the Cobra Effect, wherein the British Raj attempted to reduce cobra populations in Dehli by putting a bounty on cobras, resulting in cobra breeding farms to harvest more snake corpses, resulting in a rise in cobra populations. This incident likely didn’t actually happen, I can find no reliable source for it and the bit of this article above the paywall seems to suggest historians dispute it, but it’s demonstrative regardless. Musk and his DOGE agency seem to be doing Goodhart’s law on purpose, or at least with reckless negligence, aiming to cut the biggest amount of government spending without much regard for how much damage they do to basically everything. Reduction of people to data essentially turns everything into a perverse incentive; humanity and societies can perhaps be understood more thoroughly with detailed statistics, but to base policy and worldview on numbers exclusively isn’t rational, it’s just inhumane.

Wency Lum offered a basic overview of cybersecurity threats and some best practices to protect oneself from attacks. A primary focus was identifying phishing scam emails, which, when one is diligent, is not exceptionally difficult. UVic often sends it’s own phishing emails to train people to spot them by linking to a “you fell for it” page, which definitely made the threat of phishing more tangible when I clicked one of the links in my first year. The emails seem to have had an opposite effect on a coworker in Reslife, who told me the other day that she saw one, thought “I bet thats one of those phishing emails”, and clicked the link and was satisfied when she was right and it went to the UVic phishing warning page. This really highlights a point that Lum brings up: cybersecurity is a collective effort reliant as much on people as the systems you build for them.

Charlie Watson’s talk on accessibility outlines various conditions requiring accommodation and many existing tools that currently aim to fulfill that purpose. Watson also lays out various techniques to ensure digital design is accessible to everyday users and the tools that facilitate digital engagement.

A core framework I picked up on was a chain of design intentionality that is required for disabled people to function in society; for people to participate, they need technology built for their needs, and for that technology to function, infrastructure must be built to facilitate it. A person needs a mobility scooter to move, a mobility scooter needs a ramp to get up an incline; infrastructure is built for tools which are built for people. In order to pursue digital accessibility, you must understand the internet as infrastructure, where, just as a mobility scooter is useless in a building full of stairs, a screen reader is impaired in it’s function when it engages design that doesn’t use heading systems properly, relies on coloured text for information conveyance, or uses images of text instead of usual script. It’s always a good thing to affirm that accessibility isn’t a problem that can be solved externally; it must be built into the core design of our societal infrastructure lest disabled people be left behind.

This week’s centerpiece was a talk by Remi Kalir on social annotation. Social annotation involves the process of collaboratively adding insights retrospectively to existing texts in a forum with some degree of public accessibility, whether it be free to the general public or accessed by a more restricted group. As part of his definition of social annotation, Kalir invoked public protest art like that pictured below as an example of annotation in a social space as a method of making statements through existing cultural artifacts.

The reframing of protests like this as annotation is clearly applicable and brings a certain sense of intellectual satisfaction, but at the level of depth Kalir was able to convey in the talk, I am left unclear on what exactly the framework does to expand our understanding of these acts. Interpreting these signs as annotations is a different way of looking at these signs which I would normally understand as public art or political speech, but I am unclear on how it might be a better or worse way of seeing them. I would hardly consider this a criticism though, as I assume these questions are answered in Kalir’s book on annotations.

The main digital aspect of the talk is hypothes.is, a tool for shared annotation of digital resources that allows people within a group to make annotations on existing texts and see the annotations that others within the group have made. I have experience using Perusal, an online platform that is executed differently but can be summarized identically. The course I am taking that uses Perusal fails to incorporate it into it’s educational design, mainly because the instructor implemented it at the request of some students and had never heard of it before the class started. In that course group, you can find notes on the readings from precisely 1 student, and, to be completely honest, I’m judging them the whole time. They always do the readings before me and I always see their comments and think “that one’s a bit shallow,” or “that’s not really what the auther is saying,” or “that point already gets addressed a couple of pages later.” I do consider this a me problem; the point of social annotation as a vehicle for learning is not to share your most polished insightful musings or, for that matter, to read other people’s annotations with a critical eye to rate them out of ten. Social annotation requires both vulnerability and a willingness to engage in a way that doesn’t punish vulnerability, and I will be the first to admit I have work to do on both fronts in this context.

Social annotation, like many other progressive educational practices, can only be as powerful as a student’s willingness or capacity to engage with it. Education as we know it is designed to revolve students experiences around grades and deadlines; the goal of classes is, from the perspective of incentive sets at play, to get the highest grades by doing the fastest (which often means least) work. I aim for high grades to earn and maintain scholarships that cover the cost of my tuition while my physical disability makes it difficult to work, so I feel particularly vulnerable to how these incentive sets shape our educational experiences. Even keeners who always go for an A+ will focus on completing objectives and no more, because doing more means you have less capacity to spare for the next required task on the list, disability or not.

I’m just a bit too prideful to use Perusal to write whatever comes to my head, and I’m not getting a grade for writing out constructed, insightful responses to the texts, so I keep my notes to myself. Rather than a criticism of the technology, I consider this an assessment of how my profile as a student ends up pulling me away from educational practices that require active engagement without concrete guidelines to be successful. The only way for progressive educational practices like social annotation to make an impact is as a part of a fundamental shift in educational priorities away from benchmarks and deadlines.

This week’s course material was focused on a talk by Cable Green on the value and current state of Open Educational Resources (OERs). What I found immediately apparent is just how openly anticapitalist the whole exercise is. The problem OERs exist to solve is how the profit motivation of private companies who keep work locked behind paywalls serves to stem innovation and disrupt the effective function of the government in delivering public education.

Knowledge is as close to free to distribute as it will ever get. As Green lays out, the emergence of the internet eliminated the need for information to be shared by physically printing out and shipping content, but corporations who dealt in education still needed to be able to sell it. The scarcity that the internet effectively eliminated was preserved through the holding of rights; if the resource is unlimited, you limit it through restrictive access to keep the price up. Digital textbook leasing programs are essentially the educational equivalent to the De Beers corporation withholding their diamond stock in a weak market to keep the prices up.

This locking down of information stifles innovation. Having no access to research across a scientific field means slower progress and expensive redundancies in different organizations doing the same work. With course materials having such high cost, keeping textbooks up to date either costs schools too much or students too much, and this makes education less accessible, which means we get fewer qualified people growing up into important fields. Pursuing profit motive means making everything cost as much as you can get away with, which means locking things down wherever you can, which means slowing society down.

We know that OERs save students money. Green states that the OER program he built up earlier in his career saved students an estimated $100 million. Before this $100 million was saved, it was not being thrown into a pit. It was money increasing the profits of textbook publishers. In a capitalist system where trickle down economics still has a hold in many peoples minds, at least on some level, that money being taken from the bottom line of big publishing companies being framed as an obvious good for society is refreshingly honest. This represents a major paradigm shift where the good of society is able to be unapologetically put before profit motive while still saving governments an enormous amount of money. It may lead us to ask what other resources are not as scarce as they need to be and where else making those resources publically available might be a strong avenue for putting societal well-being above corporate interests.

In reading the B.C. Post-Secondary Digital Literacy Framework what struck me most was two underlying assumptions which, in this reflection, I hope to if not challenge then at least interrogate.

The first is an assumption that applies to a specific section: “Being able to differentiate between truth and misinformation”. This contains an underlying assumption that belief in misinformation stems from poor skills in analytically determining truth from falsehood. This seems like it should be an obvious fact, but it is not beyond questioning. Below is a video by Dan Olsen, In Search of a Flat Earth (2020), in which Olsen analyzes the internet presences of the flat earth and Q-anon movements as they existed at that time. The key section for our purposes is from 27:40-29:50, during which Olsen states “the end goal of conspiratorial beliefs is to simplify reality … Most people don’t actually believe Flat Earth because they were persuaded by shoddy evidence, or they found other evidence to be less persuasive about the nature of the physical world, they do so because it says something they already believe about the nature of the social world.” The Earth being flat would prove to flat Earthers that God created it in an exceptional way and that a powerful group is hiding that, which reinforces their wider social beliefs, so they will believe that the Earth is flat and never run out of new evidence unless they let go of those core assumptions. One’s ability to determine truth from falsehood is not useful when one is not willing to employ it.

Consider an example one might find more empathetic. My youtube shorts feed is filled with videos chronicling the failings of the cybertruck. A recent favorite is about a cyber cooler for the truck which Tesla sells for hundreds of dollars and will not fit in most cybertrucks, because if the bed is warped by a centimeter, it won’t slide in. I believe that Elon Musk believes racist and hateful things in large part because he is incompetent and not particularly intelligent. Because the cybertruck being terrible is evidence that Musk is stupid, and because that supports my underlying assumption about the general stupidity of attention-craving neonazis, I do not bother to fact check these videos; I accept them effortlessly, even though they are quite shoddily made. The only difference between me and Olsens flat earther is that I have the self-awareness to identify this tendancy and at least an intention to check my facts if ever my opinion on them becomes materially important to myself or the world.

An objection one might bring up is that access to quality education is another quite important difference between me and an average flat earther is education. A poll by the University of New Hampshire did show that higher level of education was positively correlated with disagreement that the Earth is flat, but it also showed a positive correlation between higher education and the belief that scientists exaggerated the danger of COVID-19 and showed no correlation at all between level of education and the belief that vaccines contained microchips. The assumption that false beliefs arise from failure to spot misinformation is rather ironically an assumption that humans are rational creatures who base their beliefs on information they gather, when this is not universally the case. These considerations do not necessarily undermine the goal of promoting digital literacy; being better at spotting misinformation has never hurt anyone, and other aspects of digital literacy like those focused on digital citizenship come off mostly unscathed. I’m not sure that educational design can effectively incorporate this concern. It takes personal connections and an individuals own initiative to change the core assumptions that lead to conspiratorial or anti-science beliefs, and I’m not convinced that that change even can originate in a classroom, but if an educational framework can effectively do so, it will be probably be penned by an educator, not a saxophone performance major.

Another underlying assumption is an acceptance of a highly individualistic framework. The section that most clearly exemplifies this is under Digital Wellbeing: “A digitally literate person will have healthy boundaries with digital technologies, use them intentionally and will not use digital technologies in ways that harm others.” One can easily present a cynical framing of this passage. The government stands by as enormously wealthy companies spend unfathomable amounts of money building systems to capture as much of your attention as possible, actively damaging your mental health and general societal wellbeing to generate as much revenue as they can, and the government responds to that situation by saying “hey, you should get digitally literate and have some healthier boundaries.” Here, we see a systematic problem that is being solved by attempting to systematically confer individual skill in dealing with it. It reflects an unthinking acceptance of the status quo, which is not something particularly surprising coming from a government document by a branch of the government that does not have the capability of changing this status quo. I find that note worth bringing up, since I want it clear that I wouldn’t expect this document to be a radical solution to all of our digital problems via demands for sweeping changes. The cynical framing also rejects individualism too enthusiastically, I think. As I have previously mentioned, no one is hurt by learning good digital literacy, and we should possess these skills whether or not social media spaces are well-regulated. I simply hope that through this interrogation of two underlying assumptions we can more deeply understand the subject of digital literacy and the structural forces and limits that apply to this particular attempt to improve it.