Category: Education

Jack of all trades

Joss Winn / / Education, Fun

For much of my life, I’ve taken leaps from one interest to a seemingly unrelated other. As a kid, life was just a chronic habit of fads that my parents endured with some amusement. In my late teens, I slowed down and have managed to extend my interests over a period of years rather than weeks or months.

Typically, if I have a mild interest in something, I’ll buy a book.  Even in these days of the web, an interest is not ‘christened’ until I’ve got a book on the subject in my hands. Here are the pivotal books that marked turning points for me with a brief explanation of why. I’d be interested if anyone else can plot their life in this way.

Incredibly Strange Films

Jonathan Ross presented a series called ‘The Incredibly Strange Film Show‘.  It was the high point of his career, if you ask me, and came into my life out of nowhere.  I dropped out of college to watch films and work in a video shop. Had I missed this series, I might have ended up being a Civil Engineer.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

For some reason, I don’t remember why, I left the video shop to study Journalism in London. By the time I ‘qualified’, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a hack. Besides, at the age of 19, I knew nothing about the world. How was I supposed to write about it? I returned home with no plans and picked up this book that my dad was reading. It totally captured me, so I decided to apply to university to study Buddhism. Up to that point, I had no aspirations to go to university and was the first person in my extended family to do so. I got a 1st Class degree because I loved the subject and won funding to study for an MA in Buddhist Studies at the University of Michigan. I studied Japanese, practised Zen for four years, living for a while across the road from a Zen temple in London, and spent a summer in a Japanese Zen monastery. I went on to live in Japan for three years.  All because of this book.

Independent filmmaking

Towards the end of my MA, Buddhism had become entirely academic for me and I’d lost the deeply personal motivation that I had for it. Keen to complete my MA and move on, I looked for a distraction to see me through the last few months of study and picked up this book. I borrowed filmmaking equipment from the university and taught myself how to use an edit suite before heading off to Japan for three years. While I was in Japan, I ran a monthly cinematheque for experimental film and video called Eiga Arts and organised exchanges of experimental film and video between Japanese and international filmmakers. It was a blast but it wasn’t going to pay the rent so when I returned to the UK, I studied for an MA in Film Archiving at the University of East Anglia. It’s been paying the rent ever since. I was also able to use a lot of the film I’d shot while in Japan and the US to partially meet the requirements for my MA.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

While in Japan, I had the money to buy a nice new iMac. It came with OS 9 installed, which constantly crashed. I got so frustrated having spent nearly $2000 on on a computer that didn’t work, that I looked for alternatives and found Linux. This was ten years ago and while support for Intel-based desktop computers was still fairly hit and miss, support for Apple machines was a niche within a niche. Still, I persevered and over the course of a year, learned my way around a Unix/Linux OS. It’s the only time I’ve ever worked on something all night. Repeatedly. Learning about the Open Source movement was unavoidable and I picked up this book and knew I’d made the right decision, despite the huge learning curve. It gave social and political significance to a simple act borne out of frustration. I’ve been running Linux on my desktop for over ten years now and have a basic certification in Linux SysAdmin. Open Source opened the door for me to the Commons.

Shelter

After finishing my MA in Film Archiving, I landed a job as Moving Image Archivist, with the British Film Institute. I stayed there for a couple of years until I saw that Amnesty International were advertising for an Audiovisual Archivist. The focus at Amnesty was on digital archiving and Digital Asset Management and so I found myself moving into the more general profession of Information Management. The problem with this, for me, was that I became removed from the physical aspects of film. It was all bits and bytes, storage and standards. After a couple of years at Amnesty, London was feeling oppressive and we saw no future for us there. I got talking to my Mum and Dad about how we could help each other out and we decided to build a house in their garden (my Dad was a builder but he died before we got planning permission). The deal was that we got the land for free (so making the whole thing affordable), and with 30 years or so of earning ahead of us, we’d look out for them financially as they headed for retirement. We wanted to build something modest but exceptional and I bought this book which is still a huge inspiration to me. It’s full of illustrated stories of people that have built their own, often mad, places to live. As it happened, planning restrictions meant that we had to build a fairly conventional stone cottage style place, which is great, but I still have aspirations to build a geodesic dome or a house raised on poles some day.

Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

Between March 2007 and February 2008, we had a baby daughter, moved to Lincoln two weeks after she was born, got married and built a house. I was also lucky to spot an advertisement for a job working part-time on a JISC funded repository project at the University of Lincoln, which connected nicely with my work on digital archiving at Amnesty and my interest in the Commons. When the project ended, I applied for the job I’m in now, as Technology Officer, looking at how technology might be used to support research, teaching and learning. I love it. Last summer, I started to think about the problems of technology and one that seemed obvious to me was the relationship between energy consumption and technology and how a future energy crisis and climate change legislation might impact the use of technology in Higher Education. It’s an area of research that I’m still pursuing, but the most significant effect it’s had on me is to open my eyes to the political dimensions of energy and the economy. Holloway’s book was suggested to me and it had a similar effect as reading the book on Zen. In particular, the first chapter which talks about ‘The Scream’, resonates for me with the central Buddhist idea of suffering. There have been other connections, too, not least the metaphysical aspects of Marxist theory, which often remind me of the metaphysical aspects of religious philosophy.

And that’s where I am today.

Roundhouse Student-led Conference on Critical Theory and Education

Joss Winn / / Activism, Conferences, Education, PhD

Last Tuesday, I attended the Roundhouse Conference on Critical Theory and Education, organised by students at the University of Leeds, who run Roundhouse: A Journal of Critical Theory and Practice. It was a great, inspiring day that reminded me of what it was like to be a student ((It’s been ten years since Graduate School and I don’t have much contact with students in my current role)) and why students are well-placed to affect change in universities, whether it’s pressure from the outside or covertly from the inside.

Rather than simply moaning, there was some good negative critique about the role of universities with both staff and students shifting between anger, despair and inspired subversion of the neo-liberal agenda.

A few things in particular caught my attention on the day. The first followed Mike Neary’s talk during ‘The State of Pedagogy and the University’ session. He referred to the ‘student as producer‘ and this phrase kept returning throughout the day as staff and students seemed to like it. The conference itself was a good example of student/staff collaboration and there were no apparent hierarchies in the running of the day. Students were more than capable of organising, moderating and running a day-long session that critically discussed pedagogy, the role of the university and how it might be transformed.

Secondly, the current industrial dispute at Leeds over job cuts, was a recurring theme during the round table discussions over the course of the day. This helped ground the theoretical critique in a real crisis that staff and students at Leeds are actually part of.

Thirdly, there was a discussion about parallelism, with one of the speakers saying that there was no hope of meaningful reform and that the time has come to contemplate the end of the university as a site of critical thinking. He argued that by remaining within the university, we collude in our own oppression and suggested that new autonomous spaces needed to be created apart from the agenda of neo-liberal education. There was some sympathy with this view, although another speaker referred to the time when Charles Clarke questioned the state funding of Medieval History in favour of subjects that benefit the economy. The point being made was that parallelism would still serve the interests of the State by removing the responsibility of funding ‘uneconomic’ subjects. In effect, parallelism would act as a form of efficiency under the neo-liberal agenda.

Finally, I was really pleased to hear about a couple of student run initiatives at Leeds:

The Peanut Gallery, an autonomous student-run social centre.

I hope they can keep this running as it sounds like there’s pressure to close it down.

The most inspiring aspect of the day for me was learning about The Really Open University, which “sets out to change the expectations that people have of university life, and by extension the rest of our lives.”  The conference was leafleted with a recent copy of The Sausage Factory [PDF], describing their launch.

The public launch of ROU took place on March 2nd, when over fifty students, staff and members of the larger community came together to discuss, ‘What is a Really Open University?’ This group was brought together by a recognition of the need for alternatives to the current educational system which puts everything – teaching, learning, our daily lives – up for sale, and makes efficiency drives such as the current budget cuts seem inevitable. Through a collective and participatory process, this group developed several vision statements about what education without restraints would look like.

The Really Open University website has opened my eyes to how students are using the web for education-related activism. The Really Open Union site is a good example that brings together initiatives elsewhere. I agree with Leon’s comment on the Roundhouse blog that The Really Open University is a good example of putting theory into action and should be supported.

Towards a manifesto for sharing

Joss Winn / / Commons, Education, Open Access, Open Education, PhD, Projects

One of the conclusions I’ve come to over the course of the ChemistryFM project is that sharing doesn’t need institutionalising. I don’t think we need to develop policy and processes for sharing the work we do. I’ve been drafting the final report for the ChemistryFM project this week and have written that “the overall approach taken throughout the project was to not treat it as a project.” Basically, despite being Project Manager, I’ve just let the teachers and students get on with the work we said we’d do and prompted them simply to remind them of obligations we have to finishing the project on time.

The idea of formalising the process of sharing teaching and learning materials is something I’ve found myself increasingly resisting throughout the project. Academics don’t need more constraints on their working practices, they need less. They need more freedom to share and a hand in doing so when they’re hesitant about how best to share their work; they need support when they’re unclear about how to license their resources.

I’ve been reminded of a paper by David Noble where he argues that universities are responsible for “the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property.” He goes on to bemoan

the commoditization of the educational function of the university, transforming courses into courseware, the activity of instruction itself into commercially viable proprietary products that can be owned and bought and sold in the market. In the first phase the universities became the site of production and sale of patents and exclusive licenses. In the second, they are becoming the site of production of — as well as the chief market for — copyrighted videos, courseware, CD–ROMs, and Web sites.

Of course, the OER movement is in part a reaction to this very commoditisation of education and an effort to counter the transformation of courses into commercial courseware.

I worry though that by institutionalising OERs, we’re producing constraints that go against sharing. Scaling up the production of OERs to an institutional level where sharing is considered in terms of an IP Policy, business case, marketing and ‘best practice’ will kill the potential that already exists to share. We have the Internet, we have the licenses, we have an abundance of resources to share. We don’t even need to measure success in terms of resources shared. Rather, we should be measuring the success of the OER movement by our willingness to resist the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital. To justify OERs in terms of a business case is just another way of creating capital out of immaterial labour.

In terms of our contribution to the academic commons we’ve already argued that the teacher-student relationship needs to be defined by an alternative organising principle where the student is a co-producer in the construction of mass intellectuality.

this requires academics and students to do more than simply redesign their curricula, but go further and redesign the organizing principle, (i.e. private property and wage labour), through which academic knowledge is currently being produced… creating a teaching, learning and research environment which promotes the values of openness and creativity, engenders equity among academics and students and thereby offers an opportunity to reconstruct the student as producer and academic as collaborator. In an environment where knowledge is free, the roles of the educator and the institution necessarily change. The educator is no longer a delivery vehicle and the institution becomes a landscape for the production and construction of a mass intellect in commons.

When there’s equity between teacher and student, then sharing will come naturally, it will be unstoppable and grow exponentially. When teaching and learning materials are evaluated, packaged, branded, standardised and archived, they’re turned into learning objects consumed by objectified ‘learners’. That is, if they ever get as far as becoming learning objects as each step in their production is another barrier to sharing.

Scott Leslie has got it right when he says, “if you want to share, you will”. If we help create a desire, (a compulsion is what I feel), to share in both teacher and student academics, then any existing barriers will be irrelevant. We do that, not by institutionalising sharing, but by showing the humanity in sharing; the joy of giving and receiving; the immaterial wealth of knowledge that already exists and the pleasure of creating social relations that resist the organising principle of private property and wage labour.

I’m currently reading Do It Yourself. A handbook for changing our world. It’s basically a book about taking direct action. There’s a section in there on ‘popular education‘, which I think the current debate around the institutionalisation of OERs, as clearly seen from the comments and pingbacks on Scott’s post, could learn from. It’s written by the Trapese Collective, and walks through the key aspects of popular education:

  1. A commitment to transformation and solidarity
  2. Learning our own histories and not his-story
  3. Starting from daily reality
  4. Learning together as equals
  5. Getting out of the classroom
  6. Inspiring social change

There’s no emphasis on technology or networks or even the conscious act of sharing. The emphasis is on grounding education in the reality of our social relations, the struggle of daily life, the hierarchical relations between institutions and people, and between academics and students. The desire for autonomy is also a desire to re-instate the commons, to break the enclosures that currently inhibit sharing. The conscious act of sharing is both a move to resist oppression and a drive towards autonomy. After all, we share our work in education so that one-day we might become free through education, don’t we?

The title of this post is ‘towards a manifesto for sharing’. If we were to write such a manifesto, what would it contain? Feel free to start writing it in the comment box below. Thanks.

Discussing Ivan Illich

Joss Winn / / Education, Energy, Society

In the last couple of months, the one writer that keeps on cropping up in discussion and in my reading is Ivan Illich. Until now, I’ve only ever skimmed his work but I thought that as his work seems to be freely available on the Internet, I’d re-publish them so that other readers, like you, might annotate, comment and discuss his work.

I’ve re-published three essays:

Deschooling Society

Tools for Conviviality

Energy and Equity

An eBook is available for each text, too.