A Guide to Eliminating Harmful Digital Technologies in Universities
canopic jug writes:
The Times Higher Education has an essay by Professor Andy Farnell where he rethinks digital technologies which disenfranchise, dehumanize, excludes, and even bully both students and teachers. These unfortunate technologies with their problems and misfeatures have been plaguing institutions of higher education for quite some time now. Not too long ago, universities took the lead in creating and advancing performant technologies. The triumvirate of LDAP, Kerberos, and AFS is just one which comes to mind, though there are also the original Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) and many more. Now these institutions have mostly lost their way and have become followers and "consumers" of products that not only don't meet their needs but actively work against institutional goals. He starts by asking which digital technologies could, or rather ought to, be removed from higher educational environments.
Harm occurs when technologies divert equity away from key stakeholders toward powerful but marginal stakeholders, namely chancellors, trustees, directors, dignitaries, landlords, governments, industries, advertisers, sponsors, technology corporations, suppliers and publishers. Harms arise because these entities have become invested in pushing technologies that favour their products and interests into the education ecosystem.
Obviously, we can't entertain the idea of removing all technologies from education, if only to dodge the pedant's retort that we'd better burn all books and blackboards while we're at it. Rather than looking for technical errors, let's recognise that technologies are fraught with political and psychological shortcomings in their models, structures and behaviours, which lead to misuse.
As a brief summary, we wish to identify and eliminate systems that:
- disenfranchise and disempower
- dehumanise
- discriminate and exclude
- extract or seek rent
- coerce and bully
- mislead or manipulate
What steps can you take locally?
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