The “why” of avoiding Whatsapp leads to the inevitable “how”.
The first thing is to make the decision. The dangers of bigtech have become overt since Twitter/X’s Musk became Trump’s right-hand man, but the problems are long standing. Although I wrote about Meta, there is a similar set of issues around Google, Amazon etc., all of whom have business models premised on data extraction and exploitation (as are many others).
But the decision is not straightforward, not only because of the great god of convenience but because of network effects, where the value of a tool increases the more people use or join it.
And yet, network tools can lose popularity. South Africans may remember locally- developed mobile instant messaging app, Mxit, a cultural phenomenon. And Americans may remember Myspace the pioneering, highly successful social media site. Both gone and a reminder that the tools of the present are not cast on stone.
As to what to do - the options are not mutually exclusive. Here goes.
Delete it
This is the most extreme option, and the most difficult. I do know people, in Brazil and in Germany, who have done just that. The more a tool such as Whatsapp gets integrated into business practices, the harder this is to do, but it is possible.
Dramatically reduce its use
It really is possible to find alternatives, but there may be times when something that is important to you genuinely is only available on Whatsapp. In my case, it is neighbourhood security groups; because I live in South Africa where safety concerns are an essential part of life, that is a non-negotiable for me. It is a matter of being judicious in your own situation.
I have disabled notifications, and only have Whatsapp on my phone, which makes long messages  cumbersome(I still write those on my computer 😊). It means I have to actively check in to see what I need to be aware of rather than being constantly prompted.
It is a slippery slope though, and friends who don’t know that I do have the app on my phone will be more irritated if they read this. (Which is another point, people may be irritated.)
Use alternative apps
The most common alternative messaging tools are Telegram and Signal.
Telegram is quite widely used but controversial. Most people you know have heard of Telegram, so it is an easier move. But as another friend asked me, do you prefer American or Russian oligarchs, what is the difference? (There is a longer answer but I am not going into that…)
Signal is my tool of choice. It is a non-profit organization and it simply does not collect metadata. It is robustly private, and although it is niche, it has been consistently growing. I like its president’s perspective; she used to work at Google where she grew disillusioned, and she genuinely believes in Signal’s vision. I do worry about its long-term sustainability but for now it is a safe bet.
Use alternative methods
SMS is still widely used and is a better option where internet availability and cost are a consideration. It is simple and universally compatible. People are used to using it even today given that institutions such as banks still use it. Some people I know prefer SMS and that is fine with me.
Email is still an option. Perhaps not as immediate, and that is surely not a bad thing, when there is much to be said for slowing down and being more considered in our communications.
Phone calls Remember those? Voice conversations. Commended.
Fix it
One of an array of activist and lawfare options is addressing problems head on. I was pleased to see on the excellent RightsCon 2025 programme a session on this topic.

Whatsapp is widely used as an organising tool, because it is so ubiquitous and because it is end-to-end encrypted, but of course, as I have described in the previous blog, access to metadata is also a serious risk for activists.
****
Thank you to my friend for focusing my mind on these issues. The process of trying to answer her question has confirmed for me that these really are complicated matters and tricky choices.
Now it is time to stop. Enough. More than enough.
For those interested, I am providing a list of further resources . 

​As Meta continually reminds us, Whatsapp messages are end-to end-encrypted. But it is the metadata – not the messages – where value lies. Let’s assume encrypted message content really is secure and private, and focus on metadata.
The ins and outs of metadata
Metadata is generally described as information about data, therefore making it a form of data itself. This simple illustration shows how an encrypted text/call is surrounded by metadata.

​Originally considered “digital exhaust”, metadata is now recognised as far from innocuous, and where the unique value of digital data lies. It is inadvertent data, which can be monetised. This is especially the case when metadata is aggregated; indeed aggregated metadata is content.
Note that neither data nor metadata are intrinsically bad; in fact, lack of data can hinder development. Responsibly using metadata hinges on protecting privacy and confidentiality while avoiding potential misuse for harmful purposes. The problem, however, is the dominance of extractive models for which aggregated metadata is a means to generate profit and political influence.
The value of metadata
When Facebook (now Meta) paid an extraordinary $19.6 billion for Whatsapp in 2014, experts assumed that the value proposition lay in the metadata generated by the 450 million users, and the possibility of consolidating this metadata with other products in the Meta stable. Especially as Whatsapp was acquired for 12 times more than its valuation from the previous year. It was worth paying so much because of the future profits from aggregated metadata, especially with minimal appropriate checks and balances.
Facebook (now Meta) strenuously denied this, assuring users that the two companies would be entirely independent. The terms and conditions were quietly changed in 2016, when WhatsApp began sharing user data with Facebook/Meta, breaking earlier promises. At that time, users were given a one-time 30-day window to opt out of data sharing. Data shared from that time apparently includes phone numbers, usage patterns, device information and more.
In January 2021, I dramatically reduced my own use of Whatsapp after a major update to WhatsApp Terms of Service and Privacy Policy announced mandatory data sharing with Facebook/Meta for users who hadn’t opted out in 2016. At this point, many users left Whatsapp too.
The harms of aggregating and sharing metadata
The aggregation of metadata has numerous actual and potential consequences. Integrated metadata means that behaviour across platforms can be tracked with changes over time, making predictive insights possible.
At an individual level this makes possible detailed behavioural profiling, privacy erosion, predictive manipulation, economic discrimination, social mapping exposure and personal habit tracking. At a broader societal level the implications include mass surveillance capabilities, group behavioural manipulation potential, interference with democratic processes, social engineering risks, economic discrimination and the erosion of privacy norms.
I am always struck by how neutral and objective these abstract words sound, when behavioural tracking and prediction can have such potentially profound impacts.
How can the sharing of metadata potentially harm an individual?                                                                                                                 
Consider a call logged to an NGO supporting abortion rights from a location where abortions are illegal. Data also shows the user to have stopped purchasing alcohol. They have bought a ticket to a place where abortions are undertaken (possibly illegally). Their online search history reveals a query for abortion tablets. In such a case, the caller could well find themselves arrested for illegally planning an abortion.
As mentioned before, the outcome of the US 2016 election is partially attributed to such influences. As a staffer from the outed company said plaintively in the documentary The Great Hack, their exposure was just bad luck, when there are so many more companies with the same raison d’être  - to  influence individual and group behaviours. 
Aggregated metadata is also central to data fusion technology  where automated software correlates and fuses surveillance data from many sources. Essential questions need asking so civil liberties are not infringed.
Lack of transparency about metadata
One of the many problems with unknowingly sharing one’s metadata is that it is a nightmare, if not nigh impossible, to find out what metadata we are actually sharing. Indeed, as the FTC observed, we still know so little about companies that know so much about us. It was partly for this reason that in 2021 Whatsapp was slapped with a  €225 million fine (the 2nd largest at the time) for lack of transparency, unclear explanations of data sharing practices, and insufficient user information about data usage.
I am the only person I know who has spent an endless number of hours reading the actual terms and conditions of Whatsapp, Facebook, Meta and others. It is an absorbing rabbit hole, a striking blend of impenetrable legalese, click-through mazes and omissions. Meta obviously spends a lot of money on careful and repeated marketing. A couple of examples, make the point.
Whatapp’s privacy policy says, “We can’t see your personal messages or hear your calls, and neither can Meta. Neither WhatsApp nor Meta can read your messages or hear your calls with your friends, family, and co-workers on WhatsApp.” What is omitted from this reassuring statement? What about metadata? What about 3rd party companies? What about the message recipients? And device/technical data? Storage? Exceptions? The possible omissions are too many to mention. You can imagine similar omissions around other privacy statements like “we can’t see your shared location” (individual locations? can 3rd party apps?)  and “we don’t keep logs of everyone who is messaging” (only some people? different kinds of records? third parties might keep them? collect not keep, etc? ).
Perhaps it is possible that some of these omissions might be mentioned elsewhere in the maze of ever-changing policies and agreements, if there were any chance of finding out. Of course most people don’t look, and as an experienced literate researcher I have not found them. Rather, we are expected to be reassured by messages being encrypted, and stop there.
Regulations
Meta faces significant regulatory challenges worldwide, with many substantial fines especially in Europe. Of note is the $25.4 million fine from India specifically restricting Whatsapp from sharing data with other Meta entities. Countries without suitable or strong regulatory frameworks are not protected at all from privacy invasions, surveillance and consequent behaviour modification. Such populations  are especially vulnerable  to data exploitation,  experiments and extraction. Indeed, in many, regulation is not even a conversation.
Regulations matter and those who work at the systems level matter enormously.  And so do the actions of ordinary people who might only influence the people they (we) know. But who may be part of streams that become rivers.
Responding to a bigger techno-political system
The question that I have grappled with is what harms I am contributing to by using a tool that provides metadata to systems that commodify and exploit it for profit, often through targeted advertising and behavioural prediction. This is a system premised on deception and on us ordinary mortals not understanding. It is one that does demonstrable harm to individuals, communities and to values I hold dear. The dominant techno-political system where big tech is baked in, is harming democracy itself, destroying truth and causing chaos from which the unscrupulous can profit.
It does not have to be this way
Certainly, alternatives to these (monopolistic) extractive models are desperately needed and local is often the place to look. At the same time, this is the world we live in, and it is pretty much impossible to escape entirely. I believe, as do many others, that we must and can find ways to live in it by doing the least amount of harm. And who knows, with each small act of resistance, we might erode the sea of tyranny.
As to how to practically avoid using Whatsapp, that is the next blog post.

Whatsapp is owned by Meta, which also owns Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and some 90+ other companies many relating to the metaverse. The origins of Meta are in Facebook’s 2003 precursor, FaceMash, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and 3 friends built in a week by hacking Harvard student ID images to indicate who was “hot” or “not”. Unsurprisingly women protested, and the illegal site was shut down. But crucially, the algorithm was built, and the seed was sown.
I left Facebook a few years ago and I never joined Instagram. Leaving Facebook did feel like a bit of a loss, especially as it was a nifty way to keep in touch with far-flung connections. It was a testament to the power of loose ties. I admit it was made easier by the fact that many of my peers were leaving too. Some people tell me that Facebook Marketplace is the reason they stay. But for me, the catalyst for leaving Facebook was emerging knowledge about its mental health harms.
 
Here are some reasons I am so averse to Meta, its ecosystem and its values.
 
Mental health harms
Facebook and Instagram use have been clearly linked to increased teenage anxiety, depression, self-harm, negative body image and suicidal thoughts. More than one whistleblower has exposed the fact that Meta knew of and hid its own research on these ills. Global scholars pleaded for transparency and independent rigorous research. In the US, senators across the political spectrum pointed out that Meta’s representations, both to the public and during Congressional inquiries, concealed and misrepresented its extensive knowledge about mental health threats to young people. A 2023 lawsuit alleged that Zuckerberg himself repeatedly dismissed warnings from senior company officials that its flagship social-media platforms were harming young users, After extensive denials, Zuckerberg finally apologised to families who reported their children being harmed by social media in 2024. At the time of writing, this is an empty apology, as redress and substantial changes have not occurred.
 Political influencing
The Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 exposed how social media can be an active player in political events, with profound global consequences. Starting in 2010, the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles was analysed without user consent, and used to build detailed voter profiles. This enabled specific advertisements to be designed targeting particular people in specific locations to influence their views and voting choices. While the model of targeted advertising is not in itself new, evidence showed that Facebook was able to play a key role to influence voter choices in the 2016 US presidential election, and apparently the UK Brexit vote too. In 2022 Zuckerberg apologised for his company’s data privacy violations and agreed to pay $725 million as a settlement to be paid out to Facebook users. The case is stuck in legal wrangles as I write, so no payouts have been made all these years later. In 2024, Meta also reached a $50 million settlement with The Australian Information Commissioner. The documentary of the Cambridge Analytica scandal showed how extraordinarily difficult it is for one person to find out exactly which of an individual’s extensive data is being extracted and used, and for what purposes. Although the company Cambridge Analytica has ceased to exist, there are many more companies playing similar roles today. This breach of data privacy was not an isolated event; one should assume it to be the status quo until proven otherwise.
 Special relationships
Of course, user data from Meta’s products is extremely valuable, but what happens to it is unclear. Meta has defended having “special relationships” with other companies, and in 2024 denied giving Netflix access to Facebook direct messages. A February 2025 report found that Meta user accounts were flooded with ads for casinos and betting sites after gambling firms secretly shared users’ data with Meta – without users’ permission. A privacy expert pointed out that “Meta is complicit and must be held accountable. It benefits from facilitating problematic and unlawful data practices for its clients and systematically looks the other way, using its terms and conditions as a shield rather than seriously enforcing them.”
 Schmoozing
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the third richest person in the world, after Musk and Bezos. His willingness to schmooze for influence has become overt since Trump’s recent (re) ascendance. He and the other “broverlords” have dashed any remaining illusions about supposed counterculture or liberal values in Silicon Valley. While Zuckerberg used to champion progressive causes such as BlackLivesMatter, he has recently shown his shift to the right in several ways. These include donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and agreeing to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump after Meta suspended his accounts in January 2021, after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.                                                        
Obeying in advance
Perhaps cosying up to power is “normal” business practice? What of anticipatory obedience?  In January 2025, Instagram and Facebook blocked, blurred and hid abortion pill providers’ posts, and Instagram also suspended several such providers' accounts stopping them from appearing in search results and recommendations. There was no legal requirement to do so. Historian Timothy Synder was talking about individuals when he observed that most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given, yet in this case it is a big corporation calculating what a more repressive government may want, and then offering itself without being asked. In On Tyranny, Snyder declares this a political tragedy.
Enabling hate and lies
Zuckerberg’s recent announcement of Meta’s end to fact checking and content moderation on Facebook and Instagram confirms that we live in a post-truth era. As announced,  Meta is ending third-party fact-checking and moving to a Community Notes model. This will, in their words and my italics “allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse”. This means that the safety controls that build trust and community are removed, allowing hateful speech to flourish (details here, for example gay people can be called mentally ill and women described as household objects).
Beyond political influence
In January 2025, Zuckerberg said that it’s going to be “a big year for redefining our relationship with governments”. This comment can be seen in the context of what some commentators consider to be the coming merger between the tech industry and state power, arguing persuasively that the tech industry craves state power, not simply government influence.  A terrifying and dystopian vision, science fiction made real.
There is so much more
I could go on and on, describing, for example, how Meta has admitted to illegally torrenting at least 81.7 terabytes of data from pirate sites to train AI (oh the irony!), how it has announced changes to [its] diversity programs “in light of the shifting legal and policy landscape” presumably where diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are being closed down. It has also ended its efforts to work with a diverse slate of outside vendors, such as businesses owned by military veterans or women.

And I have not even mentioned my own particular interest in the ways that big tech companies such as Meta have infiltrated education (especially during the Covid19 pandemic) nor the Global South perspective,  including digital colonialism and the controversy of experiments such as Facebook Freebasics.
 
These blogs started with a question about Whatsapp harms, leading to scratching the surface of Meta’s harms. Next is a look at metadata and Whatsapp’s role in the broader Meta ecosystem. 

Knowing my aversion to the ubiquitous messaging app, a friend recently asked me what harm WhatsApp does to me. It turned out that this seemingly straightforward question led into a maze of interwoven issues. Which turned into this four-part blog series where I explore why Whatsapp is so much more than a simple tool, how its harms connect to and contribute to serious wider crises, and how using it makes me feel complicit in those crises.
For me, avoiding Whatsapp is a political decision based on personal principles, not a technical one. Software tools are more opaque than other social and economic ills. It is easy, for example, to grasp the horrors of factory farming and the cruelties of sweatshop labour for cheap products. And the ways to avoid contributing to these value chains are clear - like buying locally sourced free-range eggs or consciously shopping for products certified as fair trade.
 Bear in mind that professionally I have focused on digital inequality for a long time, particularly in education. Through my work I have come to know a fair amount about the political economy of technology, that is the human dynamics around it - who controls it, who profits from it, and how it reshapes power relationships in society. Not everyone is aware, for example, that Whatsapp is owned by Meta, which also owns Facebook. And that Meta is effectively Facebook rebranded after its reputation was tarnished by disinformation and other scandals
Now that the details, distortions and damages have come to my attention, I can’t un-know them.
Whatsapp is a small cog in the big wheel of Big Tech which is playing a disproportionate role  in the present overwhelming polycrisis, which leaves me feeling frightened and near paralysed. By polycrisis I mean the ways that global crises amplify and exacerbate one another, including the climate crisis, the rise of extremism and authoritarianism, growing inequality, geopolitical conflicts, AI, food insecurity and on and on and horribly on.
One person avoiding one tool is a small action, but the power and possibility of small actions is more essential than ever. Of course I am not alone in saying this: a leading voice for progressive causes, Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stresses that tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. And public intellectual, Rebecca Solnit makes a powerful case for standing up on principle in as many small ways as possible.
In fact, it was the extraordinary Filipino journalist, Maria Ressa, (co-awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize) who got me to start writing after I heard her on a panel talking about the documentary 2073 and the arrival of techno-authoritarianism. It was one of those utterly bleak exposés showing how dire everything really is. When asked by a dismayed audience member, what ordinary people can do when overwhelmed by what feels intractable, Ressa urged each of us to talk to everyone we know about the issues of our fractured society which big tech has infiltrated at a cellular level.
So, this is my contribution – this series of blogs on why Whatsapp matters and how its harms contribute to escalating and serious crises. In the next blog I give a string of reasons for what is wrong with Meta (of course it could just as easily be Amazon or Google, but Whatsapp is in the Meta stable.) In the blog post after that, I elaborate on Whatsapp’s role in the broader Meta ecosystem, which is a case study of metadata infiltration and aggregation, showing how insidious, invisible and invasive a model it is.  And seriously consequential! The post after that considers what an individual like you and me can actually do to avoid using Whatsapp.
And lastly, I provide a list of resources for those wanting to follow me down the rabbit hole to further investigate the critical ideas and authors who analyse and expose the frankly terrifying and pervasive techno-political system we find ourselves living in. 

My guess is that most academics have a Scholar Alert to their names. It can be intriguing, or pleasing, or surprising, to see how one’s work is referenced and for what purposes. Sometimes it is a stretch of the imagination to see a link, but at least, references are to actual papers we wrote ourselves and to work we have undertaken.
That has been my experience to date.
Until now.....

...when a Google Alert pointed me to a paper I wrote with Cheryl Brown quite recently. Which I did not remember us having written. Although we quite plausibly could have, as we have written many papers together (albeit not for a while), and this one is close enough to a topic we could have written about.
A closer look showed more details - not just a reference, but an elaboration of the study we purportedly undertook, together with methods and findings.

It was not, as I momentarily thought, a “loskop” moment on my part. (Literally translated as “looseheaded”). There is no such paper, no such study, no such research.
We have been hallucinated!
A surreal moment.
Many reliable and insightful scholars are exploring the implications of AI for research and education, so I won’t write an essay. Just a few observations, largely that neatly apportioning “blame” is too straightforward a response, so my point here is not to out the journal (which exists) or the authors (whom I presume exist too!)
Presumably the authors are using an AI tool as a search engine, and the AI tool did what it is good at and plausibly inferred something useful. My own view is that AI tools for academics are terrible when used as a search engine but useful in other ways. There is certainly no point saying that academic authors shouldn’t use AI for their writing - it is there, and it can surely be valuable. Academics are very unlikely to explicitly set out to present falsehoods. It is a fair assumption that all academics want to contribute to knowledge in meaningful ways. It is also a fair assumption that they are under huge pressure, with often unmanageable workloads, large classes to teach, grants to chase, contracts to be renewed and actual research and writing to be squeezed in somewhere between. Add to the mix that using AI tools for writing and research is deceptively complicated.
Of course, not an excuse, but a reasonable explanation, I think.
What of the journal? In their current incarnation, journals are responsible for quality assurance which would include the incorrect inclusion of AI generated studies and references. Are journal editors realistically to be expected to check every reference? And if they are to play such a role, then wouldn’t this mean that it is only the large well-resourced journals who could employ fact checkers? Most journal editors are not paid at all, so the work, done for interest, or prestige, or service, is done on top of everything else. Yet doing it badly is bad for reputations too. And no, not an excuse. Just some context.
What about peer reviewers? Any journal editor will tell you how much harder it has become to find peer reviewers at all when everyone is under so much pressure etc. (See above). And is it realistic to expect peer reviewers to recognise every reference, even if it is within their field, especially when it is a plausible reference? Of course not.
The consequences of these kinds of hallucinations are potentially serious, given that publishing is the lifeblood of academia and knowledge creation. In single instances like this, papers can be withdrawn. But if they are already being integrated into search engine catchments, isn’t this a case of the stable door being closed after the horse has bolted?
This Alert has left me, and Cheryl, lots to think about. For now, putting it out there as a stark example of what is happening, ready or not.

Q2: What could we do right now?
The second question we posed, right at the end of our talk, was: “What could we, as this community – this conference group – do right now?”. With just a few minutes to collect responses, it was encouraging to receive over 90 immediate suggestions. We have clustered these suggestions into the following eight themes, for ease of sharing:

1. Take action, make plans
2. Communicate and share  
3. Work together, especially across silos
4. Expand the open education community
5. Develop/influence strategy and policy 
6. Be open; advocate for open
7. Challenge existing power structures; work towards justice
8. How we work is as important as what we do

Following are the specific suggestions from OEr24 participants, clustered by theme:
1. Take action, make plans

• Value the small initiatives
• Start small, keep the faith
• Small tactical actions, when safe to do so, linked to desired utopian futures
• Create agile opportunities for small tangible projects
• Hackathon; OER Hackathon
• Online sprints around a topic
• Concrete result in cooperative project or policy by OER 2026

2. Communicate and share  

• Communicate
• Share; Share the knowledge
• Spread the word (x2); Keep talking
• Spread the word in our own institutions and build the momentum
• Blog!
• Cascade key messages
• Talk to our colleagues about these topics when we go back to our workplaces
• Continue the conversations after this
• Share practice, success and failures, too
• Keep engaging in multi level discussion on OEGlobal Connect
• More discussion not repeat the same questions
• Bring these questions to our students
• Create space for conversations
• Identify the challenges explicitly - great start today. Keep talking.

3. Work together, especially across silos

• Come together
• Link
• Stop competing
• Connect and collaborate; Collaborate
• Continue to collaborate, listen to those not represented
• Seek collaborative partnerships and relations
• Collaborate more across related communities with similar goals
• Collaborate with the wider open ecosystem
• Collaborate at the crossroads
• Be more proactive in research and collaboration
• Work together and start now 
• We can't do it alone
• Coordinate our efforts more intentionally to avoid duplication
• Collaborate on sharing thoughts on embedding strategic, systematic priorities within HEIs
• Discuss the challenges in the communities, work on shared value system

4. Expand the open education community - across sectors, generations, differences

• Bring new blood into the community
• Invite practitioners to next conference
• Help two-year college folks get to these [conferences]
• Reimagine all forms of teacher education
• Continue discussing openly with different minded people
• Talk to others beyond our community
• Talk as much as possible to people outside of this community, those with whom we may well clash (at first) because we cannot only talk to each other

5. Develop/influence strategy and policy 

• Bring the white paper to our institutional leadership
• Share the OER24 keynotes with the most senior person we can access
• Get academic development/T&L teams to commit to OE
• Write business cases for OE (x3)
• Translate open as a base of other strategic themes
• Write to a politician
• Influence strategy and policy
• It’s all about the policy
• Make better policies and share these
• Influence policy, make open an integral part of what HE does

6. Be open; advocate for open

• Demystify OE
• Reuse other people's work and give attribution
• Keep modelling open practice
• Apply inclusive and open practices in our daily work
• Practice what we preach!
• Leverage resources
• Keep banging the OE drum
• Educate others in OE
• Advocate for open. Rebel against data and currency thieves.

7. Challenge existing power structures; work towards justice

• Collectively develop OER for capacity building - awareness raise in ethics, responsibility and justice in digital Ed
• Advocate for debt relief for institutions of higher education
• Prioritize transgender inclusion
• Defend the public good

8. How we work is as important as what we do

• Return to our institutions renewed in a faith in the possibility of change
• SHOW UP FOR EACH OTHER
• Learn from each other
• Encourage each other
• Support each other; Support each other to make change
• Be kind
• Insist and be kind
• Operate inclusively
• Include others
• Listen to the quieter voices
• Lift up new ideas and out of the box thinking
• Do not take the easy route
• Commit
• Be invested
• Keep hopeful. Hope is an act of resistance.

Additional, uncategorised comments

• Dance at the crossroads
• Thank Laura and Catherine for their wonderful keynote and leadership
• Read HE4Good book
• Tom Farrelly
• Pannenkoeken bakken
  
  

Finally, to wrap up this post, we note that we will continue to explore the issues, tensions and opportunities we highlighted in the keynote -- as well as the range of ideas shared by participants during our keynote (summarised above) and throughout the OER24 conference. We would like to continue to work in collaboration and coalition with many across the open education community, and will share, write and blog in the process. With many of you, we look forward to building better futures for all.

Stop making sense? Hopefully not. No, never! Stop making sense of, stop sense making? Not as long as my mind allows it. Recently, Catherine  and I were guests on Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum where Bryan’s opening question as always, was to ask what we were going to be doing in the year ahead. I responded by listing what I would not be doing- running a centre, leading a project, being at the helm of anything. But one thing I wouldn’t be doing is to stop sense making. 
South African universities have a compulsory retirement age, and that is a positive requirement in a shrinking sector.  Of course, the assumption is that older people retiring will bring younger people into the system, enabling transformation and innovation. That is surely a good. The risk though, is that expensive permanent senior staff are replaced by younger contracted staff. Who may indeed change the demographics of the sector, but by virtue of their insecure status are in a weaker position to confront and challenge their institutions.  The available data supports this: in South Africa the number of all permanent staff has been decreasing over the past few years while the number of contracted academic staff has been growing.
So, I am formally retired. Kind of retired. In another, related conversation George S started an important conversation about intergenerational knowledge sharing and solidarity. Because it is not simply a matter of handing over the baton, but of working together to change the sector and society for the better. That one is ongoing, for sure, when there is a very real polycrisis with  so much fake news, so much everything-equitable ‘washing’, so much confusion, and so much to be done.
This blog began with an update to the About Page and look where it led!  *Stop Making Sense of course also dates me to the 1980s concert by Talking Heads. It amuses me that the band’s name was suggested by a friend of the band who picked up a TV Guide and pulled out a style of presentation described as ‘the most mundane and the most informative’. Who would ever have imagined how widespread that style would become online? Writing this also sent me back to listening to Burning Down The House, Life During Wartime, Road To Nowhere…songs that seem both prescient and relevant now. But let me not get too nostalgic for an old American band, whom I am probably getting rose-tinted about because their concert had a great title!

 Along with many others, I have been mulling on the implications of AI for in/equality,  and on the relationship between AI and in/justice. This is something I have spoken about and intend to write up. To answer the question “What does this mean for educators?” has meant standing back and drawing on literature from outside of education.
Fraser’s* ideas about cannibal capitalism offered a way a way to frame an extraordinarily complex and entangled set of relationships. The image above shows the framework I have summarised from Fraser's writing, and the image below sums up the situation of AI and injustice succinctly. On the whole, the picture is gloomy. Not surprisingly. But in order to change things, we have to understand them, and this is a set of issues that has purposefully been rendered opaque. As a contribution to change, I try to map them out.
As a placeholder, as I haven’t yet managed to write up a narrative, here are the slides I have been using. They are openly licensed so you are welcome to use them, with attribution and the same licence.
 It is of course only a small beginning. Hopefully, the slides are relatively self-explanatory. Please do contact me if they are not. This is very much a work in progress!

* Fraser, N (2022) Cannibal Capitalism Verso Books

After more than two years of work, our book Higher Education for Good, is published. It is a wonderful, exciting, satisfying and celebratory moment for co-editor Catherine Cronin, myself, and the 71 authors from all over the world, as well as for the fabulous Open Book Publishers.
I have so much to say but right now, the main things is YOOOOOHOOOO and, of course, also, WHEW!
Catherine and I have written about the principles and process of the book project and will write more about the content of the 27 chapters, and of course about the tenets towards a manifesto for HE For Good. There is also more to say about how many people and roles are involved in making a book like this.
It is really pleasing that the book is published during Open Access Week, an issue close to our hearts. I spoke about why this matters so much in this short clip for The Academy of Science, whose Chairperson, Prof Jonathan Jansen, wrote the Foreword for the book.
The realities of academic publishing, the variations of open access publishing (and its attendant open washing),  those are also definitely the subject of a future blog posting.
And, perhaps most importantly, it is not only higher education that needs help and hope right now. Given the heartbreaking events happening in the world, there is more need than ever for hope.
As Catherine and I wrote in our chapter......
Hope is firmly rooted in the belief that it is never too late.
Hope is practical. It means taking action, being disciplined, making plans.
Hope is impractical. It means dreaming, being undisciplined, being open-ended.
Hope is strengthened when practised in solidarity with others. It means building and strengthening alliances, coalitions, communities.
Hope is contested and contradictory. And yet whatever its form, it is essential.
Without hope, there would be no future worth living
 

by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin 
Cross-posted at http://catherinecronin.net/reflecting/he4good-curating 

Thanks to Aras Bozkurt for the following outburst, written in response to his call  for comments on the importance of open education at the moment.

In these turbulent times, openness in education is indeed  important because its previous incarnations have lost relevance with too often the term itself having been appropriated by the very forces against which it is supposed to stand. Openness in education has also become so all-encompassing a word that it means whatever a speaker or reader wants it to mean, thus lacking consensus and even meaning.
In the narrowest sense, openness can simply refer to content being made available under a Creative Commons licence. But in the new era of generative AI, even those licences must, and do, come under scrutiny. When all multimodal content can, and is, mixed and mashed through opaque neural networks and at the click of a button, then machine-read CC licences lose their power both technically and culturally. It is often forgotten that CC licences are a form of copyright; both copyright and the permissions manifest in open licences are urgently and appropriately under review
In addition to content, openness in education is often portrayed and viewed as “nice” and “caring”. When so many educators are overburdened, underpaid contractors, their apparent failure to share and care does not indicate lack of caring as individuals, nor are those open practices individual responsibilities. It rather points to failures of educational systems and sectors which are increasingly turning the education sector into an ironically termed “sharing economy”, a gig economy of unbundled services and roles, each squeezing out profits.
Broadly speaking, openness in education refers to practices and processes that exist in opposition to the dominant discourses of big tech, platformisation, surveillance and academic metrics systems. This positions openness as a resistance force, an essential role, but limited by being against something rather than for something.
Openness in education at this moment in time has to be rearticulated, and in particular considerations of governance and structural forms are priorities. Regulatory frameworks and processes to develop them are boring and not the remit (or interest) of most educators, but without such systemic articulations, sustainable open education will be impossible to achieve. 

* Image Ian Dolphin https://www.haikudeck.com/oss-benefits-business-presentation-uXH7CLg2VX#slide13

By Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin
Cross posted at http://catherinecronin.net/reflecting/he4good_principles/
In a few months, all being well, we will be preparing to launch the book Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures (HE4Good). This open access book, a collection of work by over 70 authors in 18 countries, offers ways of thinking, conceptualising and creating possibilities for (re)making higher education, focusing on futures that foreground inclusion, equity, social justice, care and sustainability. 
In this liminal space —after completing the bulk of the writing and editing, and before making final changes to the manuscript— we are reflecting on the process of creating the book. 
Working from an understanding that “the large is a reflection of the small” (brown, 2017), we agreed from the start that each of our decisions about the book’s creation would themselves need to reflect the values of inclusion, equity, social justice, care and sustainability. So, how did this belief translate into practice?  
This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we’ll reflect on the process of making the book – in other words, what we did (or tried to do) and why. In this first post we outline how the idea for the book arose and describe our process principles. 
Seeds of an idea
In June 2021, when first discussing the ideas for what became HE4Good, we each were working as full-time academics (Catherine in Ireland, Laura in South Africa). Both committed to open education and social justice, we have been colleagues and friends for several years. Mid-2021 saw us navigating the pandemic in our own lives and HE sectors, facilitating teaching and learning alongside our colleagues, supporting teachers and students, and advocating for care and equity as HE practices and systems changed dramatically. We witnessed the escalating use of opaque digital infrastructures and algorithmic decision systems. This left so many of us exhausted and despairing – but never without hope (Czerniewicz et al., 2020). Yet we felt, as Rosie Braidotti (2020) powerfully describes, that we could “extract ourselves from this sad state of affairs, work through the multiple layers of our exhaustion, and co-construct different platforms of becoming”. The book Higher Education for Good was thus conceived as a means to counter despair, resist dominant narratives, and imagine and bring into being better futures for higher education. As we explained in our original call for chapters (December 2021):
HE for Good invites elaboration of those glimmers of alternative futures offered during the pandemic, those which foreground inclusion, equity, social justice, care and sustainability … [The book] will explore possibilities and critique with a purpose. It will offer ideas about the role of education in addressing “wicked” problems which need multiple solutions, resolutions, experiments, imaginaries. As in wider work towards social and climate justice, this book aims to answer the question: “What can be done”? It aims to foster hope and courage. 
Heterogeneity 
Our intention was not to produce one definitive stance in this book, but rather to work in coalition with other HE scholars and practitioners, globally, to create a blend of diverse choral voices addressing these key questions. Mindful of the dangers of the single story (Adichie 2009) and aware that the dominant discourses from the Global North are constructed as both homogenous and universal, we were clear in our commitment to heterogeneity and pluriversalism. 
From the moment that the call for chapters was shared, we worked to communicate with and invite participation from scholars (authors and reviewers) from many countries, with the aim of having representation from both the Global North and the Global South. Within regions and countries, we also hoped to break down hierarchies. Even for us, who have reasonably wide networks, this was not always straightforward, as we elaborate in a subsequent blog post.
We also aimed for a mixture of established and emergent voices in the book. In addition to academics (educators and researchers) at all levels, we sought submissions from professionals (learning technologists, educational developers, etc.) as well as  students, those in academic leadership positions, and educators working outside higher education but with valuable perspectives on it.  
Inclusion also extended to the selection of authors for the book’s forewords and afterwords (there are two of each). We wanted well known and well respected scholars, both internationally and regionally, noting that the latter may not have the global exposure they deserve. And  we considered it essential to end the book with a young scholar looking to the/their future. Finding the right person involved reaching out to many people, because of course, scholars of the future are not yet well known. 
We are so grateful that each of the people we asked —outstanding  scholars from Australia, Chile, India and South Africa— all said yes.
An early decision in designing the book was that the modes of expression would be varied, i.e. chapter authors would not be limited to the constraints of traditional academic formats. In order to open up possibilities for the future, we invited authors to be creative and, thankfully, many authors accepted this challenge. In addition to chapters written in conventional forms, the book includes personal reflections, dialogues, poetry, an audio podcast, and a graphic story. We decided also at the outset that the book should include artwork, acknowledging the role of artists in “seeding resistance and providing the tools for us to imagine otherwise” (Davis et al., 2022, p. 8). In our search for existing openly licensed artwork, as well as extending invitations to artists to contribute new artwork, we prioritised artists from the Global South and women artists. 
We acknowledge and thank the authors of two recent publications that inspired us to imagine other-wise in crafting the form of Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson, authors of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis (2020) and Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie, authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2022). 
Ethos of care
HE4Good authors were experiencing, and often writing explicitly about, overload and exhaustion. As editors we took this seriously, especially when individuals faced difficulties and deadlines were delayed. In addition to general communications with authors, we tried to keep in touch personally with individual authors too. When authors of a few chapters had to drop out of the project, we did not, and could not, take it personally. We decided from the start that within a project schedule with tight deadlines, we would do all we could to prioritise care.  
This flexible approach applied to one another too. We kept ourselves to ambitious deadlines throughout, but during the project each of us got Covid and each had unexpected personal commitments. We alternated the workload but did not keep a tally. That kind of flexibility is based on mutual respect and trust.
Seeding and contributing to a community 
What began as an idea shared by two people quickly grew to a project involving dozens of scholars after chapter proposals were accepted, authors began writing, and reviewers began engaging with authors’ work. Our intention and hope for the book to be more than a collection of chapters on a shared topic, but also a space to seed conversations and cross-fertilise ideas, soon became a reality. In a later blog we’ll describe in detail how this worked in practice. Our point here is that we actively opened the space of what the book could be to all authors and reviewers, inviting ideas for how individuals could meet, and encouraging contributors to think differently and to share their work with one another. In that sense, it is not simply a book, a product, but also a process and a contribution to a growing resistance movement in HE, where alternatives are being forged across the world.
Final note
​The two of us have talked at length about how to write this post, and the posts to come. We believe it is important to share our editorial process because so much of what appears in the book is the result of that collective ethos of care. It certainly lifted us when things were difficult. And yet, it is not for us to say something glib about a particular practice like “this is essential” when we know that academic and professional HE working conditions are so deeply challenging and time-constrained. We can say that we aimed to enact the principles of heterogeneity, care and community through our editorial approach, mindful that it would be imperfect yet committed to trying hard. At the same time, we have to admit that this approach is time consuming, requires continual attention, and is not always easy. 
In the next blog post, we will talk about how we set about seeding a community of authors and reviewers.
* Image from PickPick.com

References
Adichie, C. N. (2009). The danger of a single story [Video], TED Talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg 
Braidotti, R. (2020). “We” are in this together, but we are not one and the same. Bioethical Inquiry 17, 465–469. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10017-8
brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent Strategy. AK Press. https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html 
Czerniewicz, L., Agherdien, N., Badenhorst, J., et al. (2020). A wake-up call: Equity, inequality and Covid-19 emergency remote teaching and learning. Postdigital Science Education, 2, 946–967. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00187-4 
Davis. A. Y., Dent, G., Meiners, E. R., & Richie, B. E. (2022). Abolition. Feminism. Now. Hamish Hamilton.
Johnson, A. E., & Wilkinson, K. K. (2020). All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. One World.

A friend’s son was recently awarded an ESRC PHD scholarship. I pointed out that this is a Very Big Deal, that these are competitive and hard to get and was greeted by surprised interest, not surprising really given that the friend is not in academia, the rules of which are at best opaque (the ESRC had  itself been unknown).
Yes, let’s look up how rare this is, said I, turning to ChatGPT and asking what the success rates are for ESCR-funded PhD scholarships. I asked ChatGPT rather than my usual DuckDuckGo, because I suspected there would likely be several answers based on discipline etc. and that a synthesised summary would be useful.
Immediate reply was provided - 14% with a URL to a named report even the page number 48.
Seriously impressive!
Before sending the link to my friend I  thought I would check the report and clicked on the URL.
Broken link.
I told Chat GPT that the link did not work.
Immediate reply with a correction. “I apologize for the confusion. Here is an updated link."
Again, a broken link.
Another corrected reply “I apologize for the error in my previous responses. Here is the correct link."
Again, a broken link.
“I apologize for the continued issues with the link. Here is an alternative way to access the information.”
That does not work either. Never mind, I think, the ChatGPT database ends in 2021 so maybe that is why the dead links.
At least I have the report’s name.
So I search the old-fashioned way and eventually, I find the report and turn to Page 48.
No relevant data at all, let alone a percentage of 14% or anything else.
Next, I type into the box that I have found that report and the information is not there, and I need the relevant paragraph and an exact quotation.
The ChatGPT reply says “I apologize for any confusion my previous responses may have caused. Upon double-checking the relevant report, I have discovered that there is no information regarding the success rate for ESRC-funded PhD research.”
More apologies “I apologize for any inconvenience or confusion my earlier responses may have caused. If you have any further questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to let me know.”
I won’t repeat the ongoing conversation, if that is what it was, because I boringly and doggedly pursued the question, intrigued to see whether a verifiable answer ever emerged. Ongoing made-up answers and continuing apologies. And no, never a verifiable answer.
 
What to make of this?
 
Obviously, to check everything. We know this. I know this. But I almost didn’t because it was such a sensible and likely source. Except it was entirely made up. As was eventually conceded (Upon double-checking the relevant report, I have discovered that there is no information regarding the success rate for ESRC-funded PhD research.”).
 
It is intriguing that an answer was provided in the first place. I had also asked Perplexity and received an immediate response that it was not possible to provide the information.
The other striking aspect was the human voice and tone. The first person “I” and the apologies. It really did feel like a real human exchange, but it really wasn’t one.  Was it even a “real’ exchange? What is “real”? Once again, I know this. And yet….Also, why invent an answer? This adds a further human dimension of wanting to please. Any answer is better than disappointing the questioner. That is weird!
Made up, and yet not lies exactly, I think, since lies do imply intent. Rather, two “hallucinations” in one: Generative AI pretending to be human and  authoritatively and confidently making up information.
 
As we say around here, Eish!

* Image: "Hallucinations" by Sergio Cerrato - Italia from Pixabay

Our paper looking at how educators understand the datafication and digitalisation of teaching and learning has just been published.  ‘Technology is not created by the sky’: datafication and educator unease”, written by myself and Jennifer Feldman, explores datafication in education as well as educator agency. I hope it will be read because it gives voice to educators and makes what we think are important arguments about how datafication has inequitable manifestations and consequences in education. Also that educator responses are theoretically and pragmatically rationale even while so many are exploited by the dominant business models of big tech in education.
But I am not going to synthesise the paper here. I want to talk about something that happened in the peer review process, which is that one reviewer recommended – twice- that the country where the empirical study took place, and where the authors are located,  should be mentioned in the title.
The journal editors are in the UK, and the journal has an international readership. LMAT is known for astutely raising critical issues of international interest. We did not agree with this recommendation, because if we used our country in the title, we felt that this that it would signal that the issues were of local interest only, and less likely to be read. Fortunately, the LMAT editor agreed with us.
Our instinct is backed by evidence. One study which analyzed research between 2004 and 2011 found publications with a country name systematically receive lower impact values both at the general level and by subject category (Abramo et al 2016).  This is confirmed by another study which analysed a longer period, which found that mentioning a country in either the title or the abstract is associated with lower citation rates, and that this is observed for every country when all disciplines are combined (Archambault 2017).
The findings are especially marked when comparing  the global south and the global north. A 2022 study analyzed half a million social science research articles indexed between 1996 to 2020 finding that “empirical articles written by authors affiliated to institutions of the global North, using data from these countries, are less likely to include a concrete geographical reference in their titles. When authors are affiliated to global South institutions, and use evidence from global South countries, the names of these countries are more likely to be part of the article’s title”.
We agree with the authors of the 2022 paper that evidence from and about the global north is assumed to be more universal. The assumption of a paper named as from the global south is probably that it is a case study, reflecting or exemplifying a local case, quite possibly of an issue described elsewhere as being relevant by researcher from the north. It is less likely to be regarded to be making a general point of broad interest.
Yet, to return to the paper we published, we make a key argument about datafication and how it reflects, aligns with and contributes to inequality. Yes, this is a very South African concern given our sorry status as the country as having the worst inequality in the world of the countries measured, with a Gini coefficient  score of 63.0. But is by no means a local issue, or even a global south issue. Many of the richest countries in the world suffer from severe inequality. According to the World Bank, the USA has a Gini coefficient of  41.4, the UK  of 34.0, and Australia 34.4. (BTW the country with the lowest measured inequality in the world, Slovenia, has a score of 24.6 which is awful given that closest to zero is most equal). Inequality is a shockingly global phenomenon.
It is not only a country level issue. Much research shows how within education sectors, institutions are stratified unequally, for example through  inevitable rural/urban divides, and other considerations. Educators themselves within countries, regions and systems have unequal access, abilities to participate, and abilities to make choices.
This is widely known. It is important to understand how new manifestations of inequality are asserting themselves, through emergent sociotechnical arrangements which shape education. Inequities play out and morph when educators and institutions engage with the forms of datafication expressed in dominant business models brought into the system in recent years by big tech. This point is illuminated by the educators interviewed for this research, building on research by colleagues in other countries. Those with less access to resources of all kinds (from technical to cultural capital to regulatory) are the ones most vulnerable to data exploitation.
 
Which is why datafication in education is an equity issue. Everywhere.
 
References
Abramo, G., D'Angelo, C.A., Di Costa, F. (2016). The effect of a country's name in the title of a publication on its visibility and citability. Scientometrics, 109(3), 1895-1909
Archambault , AH; Sainte-Marie, AM; Larivière PMV (2017) On the citation gap of articles naming countries . Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, Wuhan, 16-20 October 2017, 976-981.
Torres, AFC and Alburez-Guteirrez,D  (2022)  North and South: Naming practices and the hidden dimension of global disparities in knowledge production in Fiske, S (ed) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 119 (10) e2119373119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2119373119
World Bank Gini Co-efficient by country 2023 ,
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country

As are so many who are responding to the catastrophe that is Twitter, I am turning to blogging again. Just over two years ago, Catherine Cronin and I dreamt up an idea about imagining Higher Education For Good (#HEForGood). We were both disillusioned with HE and looking for ways to re-energise and find hope with our colleagues elsewhere. We put out a call for proposals which had an excellent response, culminating in a manuscript that is presently under review. We are both blown away when we look at what has been achieved in the last 18 months - 27 chapters by 74 authors in 18 countries. Including reviewers, people from 28 countries involved!
We are having to be hold back our enthusiasm about sharing the stimulating and creative work that comprises the book. But we are able to - and have been - sharing the ideas that have crystallized from  the work as well as from all the reading we have done.
Catherine talked about these ideas at #OER23 in Scotland which she has blogged about here.  I have been lucky recently to share these ideas in New Zealand. A big thank you to my generous hosts there: Kathryn MacCullum and Cheryl Brown from the University of Canterbury, Sean Sturm from Auckland University and Lucila Carvalho from Massey University. It was wonderful to actually be there  physically, to engage in thoughtful conversations and to find how much the issues resonate across contexts. I am also chuffed that the recorded talks were used for teaching.
While we can't yet describe the book in detail, from reflections, readings and the book chapters, Catherine and I can offer five tenets towards a Manifesto for Higher Education for Good.
Tenet 1: Name and analyse the troubles of HE
It very soon became clear to us that to look forward and reframe positive futures, it is essential to confront and stare into the darkness. This means (in summary) naming, understanding and analysing the central challenges of HE: neoliberalism both explicit and implicit; coloniality, manifested in so many ways;  data extraction via myriad platforms; and multiple forms of inequality & exclusion.
Tenet 2: Challenge assumptions and resist hegemonies
The second tenet is that of resistance and the challenging of assumptions. This is about re-centering people and perspectives by bringing in voices and views from the margins. It is about border-crossings of several kinds including  geographic, disciplinary, status and genre. And it is about resisting and and challenging dominant narratives of knowledge, technology, economics, society and culture.
Tenet 3: Make claims for a just, humane and globally sustainable HE
The third tenet is to stake and make firm claims for just, humane and globally sustainable HE. This means claiming and growing theories for good. It means making explicit claims for the values of justice and sustainability in a humane HE sector both now and in the future.
Tenet 4: Courageously imagine and share fresh possibilities.
The fourth tenet is to courageously imagine and share fresh possibilities. Here we call for the  power and value of imagination in all forms, formats, methods, genres and approaches.
Tenet 5: Make positive changes here and now
And the fifth tenet is to make positive changes here and now, no matter what the size of them because change is contagious and because small streams become large rivers. Making change now can repair the past and create coalitions for the future.

It is wonderful, and energising, to have started talking, sharing and engaging with colleagues and friends in various countries about ways of making hope and creating change. Looking forward to elaborating on these ideas, and on the fantastic chapters in the book as soon as feasibly possible!
* Check here regularly for updates on #HEForGood, including links to presentations.

Recently Mandy Garner from University World News contacted me with a specific request to write something positive, particularly about how technology has improved access, enabled inclusion, that sort of thing. It was a challenge - how on earth to say anything positive about this past period in higher education, let alone about the role of technology?
This is what I came up with, hopefully managing to be both outraged and optimistic.....
There is something rather tone-deaf about the aphorism, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’. If anything positive has come out of the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education, it is surely despite the crisis, not because of it.
It is also impossible to attribute anything much – let alone anything positive – to the ‘online pivot’ and its associated technologies.
Firstly, the shift online has been only one factor among many that have been endured by students and academics over the past 18 months, including illness, death, family economic crises, change of responsibilities, change of modes, loss of educational communities and different pedagogies. These cannot be teased apart.
Secondly, what has been called online learning has largely been emergency remote teaching and learning. Due to haste, deep fatigue, trauma, global unevenness and uncertainty about the future, there has been insufficient time for the considered planning needed for fully online programmes.
Yet, somehow, some aspects of higher education have gone right, and, in the spirit of appreciative enquiry, it is worth articulating what these aspects might be.
Now that inequality and inequity have been seen, they cannot be unseen
Inequality is a social scourge, inevitably infiltrating higher education. It is almost a decade since former United States president Barack Obama described it as the most serious challenge of our time.
Nothing has changed and, until COVID-19 hit globally, it became inescapable only when the entire higher education sector sent their students home.
The pandemic made it impossible to ignore the inequalities hidden on residential campuses where connectivity and student residences appeared to level the playing field. Those brick-and-mortar spaces hid other forms of unequally distributed economic and cultural capital.
The pandemic has made visible what should have never been ignored. Now that the impacts of inequality are clear and visible, they must never again be rendered unseen.
The classroom has been made strange
By shifting mode, academics and educators have had to look with fresh eyes at their learning environments; the classroom, as Shanali Govender describes it, has been made strange again.
For many long-standing educators, the foundations of teaching had become opaque, lost in familiarity.
While the initial panic saw a frantic rush to upload content in a bid to salvage the academic year, as the pandemic has inexorably worn on, it has become clearer what learning involves. Going online has made the supporting skeleton of pedagogy, of community and of curriculum explicit.
Since the onset of the pandemic, attention has turned to rethinking time, reconceptualising space and learning environments, mapping pedagogy in new ways and reconsidering curricula.
After the initial panic, online learning design has seen shifts to enabling interaction and designing new forms of assessment, challenging taken-for-granted practices and at times improving those historically practised in face-to-face teaching environments.
Thus, while catalysed by the pandemic-induced pivot online, the fundamental issues of good teaching have received more sustained attention, no matter what the mode.
Collaboration against the odds
Universities are competitive institutions fostered by rankings and metrics that reflect a marketised culture of consumer choice. Research collaboration crosses borders deeply located in disciplinary knowledge.
However, teaching is considered a solitary undertaking with academics rewarded in promotion criteria that privilege individualist behaviour. If anything, collaboration in the teaching space has been disincentivised.
Yet, over the past 18 months, there have been myriad examples of informal mutual assistance. And at speed. Formal collaborative arrangements have sprung up and have been consolidated.
This generosity is evident in the collection of examples crowdsourced by Alexandra Mihai showing the numerous inter-institutional partnerships in academic staff development.
These include professional development courses designed across and for multiple institutions nationally and internationally, teaching and learning consortia and the creation of openly licensed toolkits and resource hubs.
In short, the ‘not invented here’ barrier was broken, and that is surely something that has gone right.
Rules got broken
The higher education sector is notoriously slow to change. Despite there being hubs of innovation in different disciplines, universities at an institutional and often at a national level are governed by regulations designed to serve previous outmoded dispensations, many of which were on the way out even before the pandemic began.
Rules were broken to prevent sectoral collapse: the multimodal approach to saving the year, combining analogue forms from paper, to radio and television – and digital forms including flash drives, pre-packaged tablets, mobile internet vans, cellphones and, of course, laptops with Wi-Fi.
This has meant regulatory categories were understood as overlapping and categories of provision porous.
Strictly demarcated rules specifying what is and isn’t distance education, what can or cannot receive state funding, what can or cannot be defined as ‘presence’, ‘hours spent together’, ‘hours in a classroom’ – these all got broken to save the academic year. And to save the life chances of students whose futures depend on the academic year being completed.
Deeply imperfect as this has been, policy frameworks and the regulatory environment, usually glacially slow to change, were adjusted to protect institutions and for the greater good of students. This flexibility, made possible by breaking the rules, shows what is possible and what needs to continue.
Addressing barriers and structural problems
To go full circle, many of the persistent structural challenges shaping the higher education sector are now in plain sight and can no longer be wished away.
Some of the fundamental socio-economic issues shaping the deep inequalities which characterise the higher education sector have started to receive attention.
There has been recognition of how many students face enormous barriers to learning. The diversity of learning settings and their associated challenges have started to receive proper attention.
Importantly, there has been a renewed emphasis on the importance of good teaching and the benefits of collaboration, both for equity and knowledge sharing.
Leonard Cohen could have been talking about teaching offerings in his song "Anthem": Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

 

Last year 22 of us from 15 of South Africa’s 26 universities collaborated on a joint paper about the pandemic in South African universities, from an equity and inequality perspective. Many of us had never met one another but we all agreed that it was a serious issue which we could all contribute to from a range of context-specific experiences and varied perspectives. We think the paper was richer because of the multiple voices.
 It was my wild idea but of course nothing would have happened without everyone’s enthusiastic participation. One of the co-authors, Matete Madiba, suggested we talk with her and colleagues at her university about collaborative writing. For us this was a positive experience, which is not automatically the case. These are the thoughts I shared….
 Why write collaboratively?

1. It is interesting. It really is interesting. You learn so much from your colleagues. And when it goes well, the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts.
   
2. It builds community. It brings together people with shared interests and a shared project. Then through those shared projects, connections get made that lead to further projects.
   
3. It is a good way to ensure that you actually do the work. When you write alone, it is too easy to prioritise other things. When you write collaboratively, you have obligations to other people so it is harder to give up.
   
4. It can improve quality, because there is so much more brainpower to draw on. But also because people can take different roles and bring specialist expertise.
   
5. It can change dynamics so that everyone becomes a co-creator, or a participant, rather than an object of study.
   
6. It can build confidence for people with less experience or confidence, especially if there is a mixture of experience working together.
   
7. It increases visibility. With more authors there are more possibilities for discoverability.
   
8. It might be the difference between published and not being published. Given the pressures on academics and educators, the fatigue and the lack of time to think, let alone write, this may be the only way to get something written and published.
   
9. Your university will get some funds if the journal is on the DHET accredited list. In some cases, some of this funding will accrue to the author.
   
10. It might mean early publishing advantage.
    

Types of collaborative writing
Of course, there are different kinds of collaborative writing.
In the first case, there is a shared issue which will be grappled with; the explicit aim is for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. There is a shared problem, probably with multiple sites. This works best when there is no intention to resolve the issue in the sense of coming up with a single solution, but to demonstrate complexity. In the case of our paper, it was consciously a process of collective meaning making.
In the second case, there is a skeleton developed and a division of labour where different authors write different sections.
A variant of this second option might involve an expert brought in to write specific sections.
Some principles . Let’s not pretend. Collaborative writing is not a walk in the park. It makes  a difference if there is a shared understanding. Here are some principles we have found useful.

1. Keep everything transparent. Everyone need to be able to see everything. Err on the side of inclusion.
   
2. Be organised.  Have a shared folder which everyone can edit but one person manages. Keep drafts, resources and so on which everyone can contribute to and use.
   
3. Give and take feedback respectfully. Maybe this one is super obvious? I hope so.
   
4. Be open minded. Writing together is a learning experience. Your starting point is that you don’t know everything, otherwise why would you be doing this? Collaborative writing also works best when you are not aiming for one fixed “answer’.
   
5. Be flexible. The process will change as you go along and that is OK.
6. Be clear which of your words and ideas you are adamant to keep and which you can let go of. In other words, there will be compromises, so be explicit about what is non-negotiable.
   

Agree a process. Even though it is a collaborative document, it is important to make some key decisions upfront.

1. Agree on first author before you start. This person may need to play a mediating or co-ordinating role depending how it goes. But even if they don’t need to (if you are lucky), first authorship can be so political, it is better to get this one out of the way before you begin.
   
2. Agree on how authors will be listed after the first author. The easiest is alphabetical order but you may also decide to do in terms of how much work each person has contributed.
   
3. Decide upfront on roles, who might draft, review, and edit.
   
4. Make sure that every named author signs off on every version of the paper- the one sent for publication, the revised version and the final version.
   

 There has been a lot of collaborative writing happening during this pandemic period, and it would be great to hear of other experiences too.

Image: Faelle @deviantart CC 3.0

Turns out that announcing I am going to be blogging regularly has not made me blog regularly. So, this is an announcement that I am going to blog irregularly. Or continue to blog irregularly. I am still thinking about edtech as coloniality but of course I have been doing Other Things.
One of the Other Things I have been doing is writing an Insider’s Guide to Navigating the Research Bureaucracy at my university. You know, everything that you wished someone had told you? Turns out there is a lot to share about the informal systems as well as the formal ones. But that is not really blog worthy.
Something else I did was write a piece on South Africa for the 2021 Educause Horizon Report. The brief was to describe higher education in South Africa especially in the light of the key trends identified by the Panel this year. That is on page 39 of the Report.
What was striking is that Higher Education in South Africa represents an extreme case of a situation that the pandemic made clear is pretty much a global situation: inequality for students, for academics, for institutions, for national systems, for the sector as a whole.
And how Covid has made everything so much more ingewikkeld - the dictionary says that means vexing and complicated.
And how there is so much that needs to be better understood. Which is why I concluded the piece with a set of suggested research questions:

• What are the risks of collecting and analyzing student data, especially for poor students, students with barriers to learning, and students from the peripheries? In what ways are they more vulnerable to exploitation?
• How can data practices in higher education be carried out in a manner that pays back to communities from which data is extracted?
  
• As data literacies become more complex, how can these be integrated into higher education curricula in culturally appropriate ways?
• Whose interests are being served by new models of teaching and learning provision? Are they, as some claim, simply creating a second—and lesser—tier of education for the less well-off?
  
• How can systems be designed so that stackable credentials serve the public good, rather than only narrowly addressing employers’ needs?
• How can the broader social risks of algorithmic bias be mitigated in universities, given that AI is not yet widespread?
  
• Since OER have such obvious benefits for higher education in terms of adaptability and cost savings, why are they not more widely created and used? What are the enablers and constraints for their uptake?
  
• What is the role of private companies in emergent forms of blended and online learning? Given the speed at which new stakeholders have entered the higher education ecosystem, what have the risks been of these new relationships? How can less-well-resourced universities, in particular, ameliorate such risks?
  

Let's hope that we can find ways to undertake this research and to find answers.

This blog is part of the section on coloniality and the exploitation of natural resources. This in itself is wide ranging, so this blog is very briefly about how those of us working in teaching and learning in digitally-mediated higher education can't really escape thinking about greenhouse emissions.
The link between digital business models and climate change may be less obvious than other characteristics of coloniality. It was an area that I had an inkling about but once I explored it, I went down too many rabbit holes (many references!) to elaborate on in one blog post.
During Covid there has been a fair amount of coverage about how lockdown has been good for the planet and how greenhouse emissions plummeted.
Which is wonderful and has led to conjecture about how this might be sustained.
At the same time, in Higher Education, there have been calls for increased investment in digital infrastructure, for a variety of reasons. While these seem commonsensical, they have to be made with an eye on the planet.
Digitisation exploits mineral resources (which deserves a blog of its own) and it contributes to greenhouse emissions.
One useful paper Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations* (worth reading in full) studied the changes over ten years, summarised in these graphs.

What is immediately noticeable is the growth of green house emissions from smart phones and from data centres (i.e. "the cloud"). Policy researchers such as Research ICT Africa argue that ubiquitous smart phone ownership is needed to overcome the digital divide.  Analysts such as Gartner, and many others have underlined that HE information systems are moving into “the cloud”.
So to overcome digital divides, and follow current trends, there is a danger of worsening green house emissions. A paradox?
These trends combined with these graphs make a striking case for green energy in higher education digital infrastructure, highlighting that it is impossible to divorce the opportunities of the digital for teaching and learning (and higher education) from responsibilities to the planet

*The study was undertaken pre-pandemic; I wonder what the situation looks like now?

This 2nd blogpost on Calculating Coloniality dovetails beautifully with a request from AdvanceHE to present a short video provocation, available here,   on the future of higher education,  as part of a panel with Vasengelis Tsiligkrisis and Mark Burkin.
In the previous post, I argued that coloniality and current dominant extractive business systems both use technology for the primary purpose of profit making and market expansion.

It is impossible to talk about the future without acknowledging that we are in the middle of a pandemic. What is interesting about Covid-19 is that while everyone recognises the horror and terrible impact of Covid19, in education the pandemic has also been described as an unanticipated and even exciting digital education experiment - indeed that the pandemic has been seen an opportunity to leapfrog into a digital future.
I am worried about that digital future. I think that the pandemic has seen numerous practices which were already of concern pre-Covid, become entrenched, and that without intervention, 2030 will see higher education fully colonised by extractive technology-based business models.
The word colonised has been used metaphorically by scholars (describing for example data colonialism or digital colonialism) yet strictly speaking denotes, as Maldonado-Torres (1) “political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation”
 So, I prefer the term coloniality which, instead, he explains as “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations”(1). 
The point is that such colonial ways of being have become normalised, they are acceptable ways of engagement and of treated as the default terms of relationships. And while they don’t take traditional historical forms of direct subjugation of one nation by another, fundamental patterns, behaviours and relations of power persist and are reinscribed today.
New systems of extractive technology-based business models are an important vehicle for this reinscription, enabling the ultimate end goal of profit making and market expansions. While they hold out promises of progress, they require buy in to a system characterised by inherent inequalities, shaped by a homogenising world view and underpinned by new forms of exploitation.
To talk about new forms of profit making and market -making in education, it is necessary to engage with the impacts of digitisation in society more generally. Unfortunately, so far, Higher Education is proving to be a mere subset of these broader extractive systems, unable as yet to provide robust alternatives as we are still in the early stages of imagining, researching and testing what these might be.
Numerous scholars have described how technology is being appropriated and shaped by neoliberal systems.  The culmination of this scholarship is provided in the detailed synthesising and analytical account of Zuboff’s work, on surveillance capitalism (2) which she succinctly describes as “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales”*. Interestingly she also describes it “as an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of people’s sovereignty”.  It is striking how this loss of sovereignty is at the heart of the colonial project.
Under colonialism individuals were themselves a form of capital through their labour, forced, indentured, and enslaved while their assets such local knowledge, land, natural resources fed the new economy. These relations persist, albeit rebranded under a contemporary veneer. But individuals now provide an additional form of capital: their data a powerful financialised asset (3)** exponentially growing in value through the collated minutiae of the total human experience- what people do, their habits and behaviours, where they are, the moves they make, the views they express and so on.
The marketisation of HE has already become pervasive.  Extractive business models are not limited to the big tech companies, they provide templates for businesses everywhere including in education. It is no co-incidence that there is currently increased investment in educational technology. Not only did the online pivot provide business opportunities, but ed tech companies are leveraging and experimenting with ways (described as innovative) of exploiting student data and experience for profit. The opportunities of the grand experiment afforded by the pandemic and of algorithmic academia has seen an annual investment growth rate of 16.3% expecting to reach $404 Billion by 2025 (4).
The fact that so much of the technological infrastructural investment is being made by venture capitalists with their profit-making agendas is a cause for concern.  For digital infrastructure to be fairly and equitably available,  it needs to be a public good which public universities should be able to leverage.
It is not simply the provenance but also the nature of that business model, premised on data extraction and financialisation which is especially worrying.
People often understand this data to mean the extraction of private information (like a name or number) and while this is important, what is even more important is what companies originally called digital “exhaust” . This is where it turns out the value lies- in other words the content is less important than the metadata and the “ambient” data that digital services collect. This is what we listen to, where we linger, who we connect with, what we prefer, what we say in passing, what we ignore, the list goes on and on). This data is collected to build models which can both predict and influence, which can shape behaviour and thought. 
It is still early days to understanding this in society in general, and even earlier days in higher education.
The marketised nature of universities has been recognised for decades, and the term academic capitalism has summed up how knowledge has come to be understood as a private commodity rather than a public good. Prior to Covid, the platform university exemplified the role of big tech companies and their practices shaping academia. What has been illuminated in recent times is how the pandemic has been a catalyst for the extension of surveillance capitalism into HE academia, as universities everywhere invested in services and platforms to service the over 200 million university students who “pivoted” hurriedly online. Relationships with companies such as Online Programme Managers have substantially increased (4) as well as with a whole range of companies providing unbundled services for the entire student journey – from student applications to online proctoring, as well as the student experience through learning analytics and the like.
Even in the emergency rush online, the question of student data privacy has received some attention. In some universities and countries attention is being paid to the ownership of academic content through data privacy regulations and increasingly through data privacy positions. Much less attention is being paid to the “digital exhaust”, and to the control of extracted data. In contemporary business models, students are not owners of all their data; the risks are therefore considerable with student ambient data being consolidated into broader digital economic ecosystems. Even if the core data content is made private, the digital exhaust as an asset adds value.
Let’s take Google for Education as an example. It offers a collection of tools to collaborate (Docs, Slides, Sheets, Drive, Jamboard) and communicate (Mail, Meet, Chat), for classroom management (Classroom, Assignments, Forms) and administration (Keep, Calendar). These tools are a subset of the larger Google ecosystem (think of Maps, Translate, Chrome, Youtube etc). The promise of easy integration is paid for by consolidated and manipulatable data sets of students who will become in future consumer citizens. Catch them young and they are hooked into the entire system for life.
Through the shift to ERT, universities have delivered an entire generation of students to extractive business systems driven by profit seeking imperatives.
There is no time now to talk about the co-operation between big tech companies, nor their special relationships with third parties, although there is evidence that this is exists.
What is critical though in the Google example, is the centrality of Google search at the heart of the Google Alphabet behemoth.  Prior to the pandemic, it was already understood how search played a gatekeeping role in knowledge formation. Google has over 90% of the search engine market and is so popular its brand has become for a synonym for search.  
A 2020 investigation (5) showed that a significant percentage of search results on Google search front page results point to Google’s own products- such as Youtube and others. If profit-making rather than relevance or neutrality determines which information is found online this has real implications both knowledge comprehension and for knowledge creation.
It is significant that it is a decolonial scholar, Mbembe (6) , who has warned of knowledge systems worldwide being underpinned by the logic of value extraction (6) thus subverting the knowledge agenda.
I will end where I began - with coloniality. Maldonado-Torres reminds us, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day. What this means is that these extractive practices are not outside of us as citizens, as educators, as academics and as students. We are participants and we have responsibilities.
In short, extractive economic systems are shaping the future of education and unless policymakers and knowledge makers act soon, fast mutating forms of coloniality will be imprinted in the DNA shaping the future of the university and the higher education sector.
 
References

1. Maldonado-Torres, N (2007) “On the Coloniality of Being, Cultural Studies, 21:2, 240 –
2. Zuboff, S (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Profile Books
3. Komljenovic, J. (2020) The future of value in digitalised higher education: why data privacy should not be our biggest concern. High Educ (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00639-7
4. Holon IQ (2020) https://www.holoniq.com/notes/global-education-technology-market-to-reach-404b-by-2025/6 August 2020
5. Slate (2020) How Google Search Sold Out https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2020/08/what-went-wrong-with-google-search 14 August 2020
6. Mbembe A, (2019) Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe Achille Mbembe interviewed by Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen in Bergen, Norway, on 30 November 2018 and published by New Frame in 2019. https://www.newframe.com/thoughts-on-the-planetary-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/

 
*In an interview 9 Harvard professor says surveillance capitalism is undermining democracy – Harvard Gazette) , Zuboff stresses that although it was Google that first learned how to capture surplus behavioral data, more than what they needed for services, and used it to compute prediction products that they could sell to their business customers, in this case advertisers, surveillance capitalism is no more restricted to that initial context than, for example, mass production was restricted to the fabrication of Model T’s.
In other words, it is this model which provides a template which is being explored and exploited in higher education.
** Komljenovic makes a compelling argument for digital data to be understood as assets rather than commodities, for reasons more complex than it is possible to summarise here. Best to read her excellent article.

This is the first of a series of blog posts for thinking aloud about coloniality as it is being enacted through tech-based extractive business models and new forms of sovereignty. The title has triple resonances for me- calculating as in ‘working out or making sense of”, calculating as in cunning and calculating as in the numerical basis of new forms of digital society and digital education.

Digital colonialism and data colonialism are terms which have some currency at present. I have heard them used in the fields of education, sociology, computer science and elsewhere.  They are sometimes used metaphorically and sometimes to refer to big US tech companies. I was intrigued when the prominent decolonial scholar Achille Mbembe commented that the world has become a data emporium, a vast field of data awaiting exploitation, of predatory extractive forces, which can be seen as part of ongoing histories of colonisation. This signals a confluence of thinking from different domains.
Strictly speaking colonialism refers to the sovereignty of one nation over another, literally of one territory over another. Yet the term is more than simply symbolic or metaphorical. The term coloniality strikes as more apt as Maldonado-Torres describes it: “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations”. 
It is the systems, practices and patterns of power that echo and repeat colonial forms of engagement. They have become the default terms of relationships and have become internalised, normal and indeed the default.
During the pandemic, which both critics and evangelists have described as a global educational experiment, I have been especially interested in how coloniality is playing in Higher Education. Thinking about this means considering how the characteristics of coloniality play out in society generally, given that, at present, Higher Education is a subset of these practices, rather than a challenge to them.
The key ongoing colonial characteristics which echo historically, and which are being re-enacted and reinscribed now are as follows.

1. The ultimate goal is profit making and market expansion
   Technology is used to achieve these objectives
2. Exploitation
   Exploitation of people and natural resources
3. Promises of improvement and progress
   Premised on a story of "civilisation" and the provision of a new belief system
4. Intrinsic inequality
   Inherently unequal, based on unequal power relations and engenders inequality
5. Assimilation
   Dependence on various forms of buy in through assimilation, elite capture, and so on
   A homogenising culture and filtered world view
6. A value set told through a single story and a universal perspective constructed through the education system.

 
That is the taster! I have loads of notes and examples (thank you Evernote), and writing the blog posts will make me concisely articulate what each of these characteristics or categories would look like, and how they should be refined.

The next post will be about profit making and market expansion.

A new year, a new resolution. Mine this year includes to start blogging again (the others are not for public consumption!).
I have been an intermittent blogger, even at a times a regular blogger (well quite a while ago now), and sometimes a guest blogger. Also various articles in publications including The Conversation, World University News and Educause Review.
Now starting again on my own site, and keeping it simple, just to get going again. Let's hope 2021 does not throw us too many curved balls.

Image thanks to Tim Mossholder, Unsplash