[Xmca-l] Re: remote_online learning?

Tue May 19 14:04:47 PDT 2020

Hello Tom,

Thank you for posting the link.

I did finally get around to reading the Klein article, and it is fairly dismal the manner that she outlines the intentions of Mr. Schmidt. That is not to say that she is far from the mark, but we are not just unthinking pods in the matrix, powerless to articulate the way technology is distended into our lives.

I think what bothers me most about the Klein article is the tone. It reinforces through negation a fallacy that technology is inevitable (and resistance is futile). I say this because she presumes this narrative has become the hegemony upon which she reacts. It is far too doomsday.

At the same time, a lot of her concerns are valid. The trawling for power in Washington by Silicon Valley is not unknown to us.

Yet, I also had a real hard time with her juxatposing Schmidt with Bill Gates. Gates is working to do actual good in the world by projects such as the humble toilet in geographic locations without waste treatment facilities, or low water infrastructure (and we might as well include Warren Buffet in that equation, because the lionshare of the funding flowing into the Gates Foundation is from him. Buffet did not make his billions through technology, unless you want to include the telephone).

I happen to know that the Gates Foundation is funding efforts to encourage agricultural developments in places like Columbia to grow coffee to replace illicit crops, in order to scale down the violence that coincides with the drug wars. These efforts are working.

Why does she leave this out of the discussion? That's the general problem I find with Naomi Klein, is the chicken-little-sky-is-falling perspective.

She seems to be similar to those trumpsters who blame the genesis of COVID (if not upon China) upon Gates, as some strange mastermind move to control the world.

Tom, I think it is right and human that you responded to the bleakness of the tone, but that doesn't mean this worldview is correct or accurate. Technology will always be a tool for use. It is not monolithic. There is the off button. We do still have a democracy and processes in place to deliberate the way forward.

As long as humans desire freedom there will always be resistance to control systems, generating a constant search for the chinks in the armor, or other loopholes to squeeze through. People will always use technology in ways that were not anticipated, but just as that can be assertion can be construed as dismal, it can also mean good news, that we always have agency to decide how to use our tools.

Also, one stick in the spokes that was glaring for me is that Mr. Schmidt will never be able to address the laws for mandatory education for disabled children with his goals for flattening the classroom into two-dimensional online learning screens. He will never be able to walk around that law.

So there are many ways this "technology is inevitable" narrative simply does not hold water for me.

I hope this might be a little encouraging.

Kind regards,

Annalisa

________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 10:46 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: remote_online learning?

  [EXTERNAL]

Hello Tom Richardson
     This topic has been the front and center in the "Re-generating Chat Project" that has just finished its
planned two year efforts that focused on the challenges to human development, and theories of "Development
in the Anthropcene.  Two months ago, the word Anthropocene was replaced by the code word, covid-19, a pandemic.
Both crises pose huge challenges to theories of development as well as to actual development of huge numbers of people around the  world.
     The MCA-linked website, CulturalPraxis currently has a number of essays on the challenges of this historical moment, and the opportunities.
      In the United States, the crisis has deschooled society in the most dramatic way one can imagine -- A way that literally forced
a massive re-mediation of human life.  Education, the wheel house of most members of this discussion over the years,
is now a family affair big time. Simulaneously, home-worksite relations have been disassembled,  both modes and relations of production are getting a shock that is crumbling institutions (home, school, work,).

We can really get the feel of Roy D'andrade's comment that doing social science is like studying rocks in a rockslide.  This rockslide moves a warp speed and its invisible.

Remediation of existing classroom structures is what we have been about for 100 years.
Seems like there has never been a more appropriate time to start providing working models of effective practices that do NOT
assume that things will return to Christmas, 2019.

Thanks for asking.
mike

On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 9:07 AM Tom Richardson <tom.richardson3@googlemail.com<mailto:tom.richardson3@googlemail.com>> wrote:
Greetings Xmca-ers
I would   like to raise a question.
In the article by Naomi Klein linked below, apart from all the major questions about  our futures  - personal freedom, health protection, democratic control and the power of Big Digital Tech_AI, international competition etc. that she raises, I wondered what from a Vygotskyan approach to child/human development/education can / should be a reply to these sentences on the 'home schooling' that has (or hasn't) been happening  recently:

"Indeed, Schmidt has been relentless in pursuing this vision. Two weeks after that article appeared, he described<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtAyGVuRQME__;!!Mih3wA!VRgkzssOuSyNvpVQWR2QH7dShhiXD5eWtYs2HahNwv_pKUU7G9GOQZMrzIpGsa_-KDBGFw$> the ad-hoc home schooling programming that teachers and families across the country had been forced to cobble together during this public health emergency as “a massive experiment in remote learning”.

The goal of this experiment, he said, was “trying to find out: how do kids learn remotely? And with that data we should be able to build better remote and distance learning tools which, when combined with the teacher … will help kids learn better.” "

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic__;!!Mih3wA!XMYZLij5q55r41EXif-MJost6K3shuLNs0kLhbi0Fs37vgn8IN9Dk9pb30OjNbBhhx2v3w$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic__;!!Mih3wA!VRgkzssOuSyNvpVQWR2QH7dShhiXD5eWtYs2HahNwv_pKUU7G9GOQZMrzIpGsa-SnnFGDg$>

Just asking
Tom Richardson
Middlesbrough UK

--

"How does newness come into the world?  How is it born?  Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?" Salman Rushdie

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For new MCA-related website see: culturalpraxis.net<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!V4rtgUKjjshdiOxbIML_kuerunhUbHYomcCKiRVA5FkPs1WJIJwbuavyFoG613bJeWFP-g$>.

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