Oh! They had an OLPC.
With the post-vacation hustle and bustle, we had been putting off commenting on another (more) of the events directly related to education this summer (can we talk about something like a ‘Documenta Effect’?). The event in question is the international workshop on alternatives in education entitled
Pedagogical faultlines
. (web and blog), organized by the Waag Society (Amsterdam), Sarai (Delhi) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam). The workshop shared with the
Goat tracks of self-education
symposium (in addition to exactly the same dates -September 21 and 22- and the topographical metaphor in the title) the desire to relate the spheres of education and technology, only from quite different approaches. While the TkH collective proposed in
Goat Tracks of Self-Education
to apply the philosophy of the open-source movement to education, hacking and opening its codes, the reading and the proposal to combine education and information technology in the case of the Pedagogical faultlines workshop was somewhat more literal, it seems.
We will not go into much detail about the contents of the workshops, especially because we were not there to assess it, however, we dare to glimpse, reading the extracts of the different presentations that you can find in this pdf, a certain fetishization of technology, understood as something capable of optimizing and making any process more efficient: educational, social, communicative… technology is often given a neutral and innocuous character, losing sight of the fact that technology is something that not only allows manipulating objects, ideas or languages, but that technology in turn transforms, reciprocally, the subjects who make use of it. This is what fails, and it is something that we know very well, and that nevertheless, seems to be lost sight of when talking about the application of ICT to the educational environment.
As alternatives in education were discussed, the workshop proposed to practice what it preached and avoid the conference format, testing ways of presenting, sharing and building information that were more open and participatory. On the other hand, we also find interesting the inclusion of experiences from South America and India, in what may be an attempt to avoid falling into Eurocentrism when addressing these issues.
Finally, and although it has nothing to do with the above, we want to highlight, for the part that concerns us, because we find it interesting and also because yes, this reflection of Florian Schneider of kein.org:
What is usually described as crisis in education relates to the privatization and partly dissolution of the institutional matrix in the modern educational system? Today, learning is becoming a private affair and the primary goal of self-education is to perform a permanent availability of the self in real-time rather than just showing discipline in a system of spatial control. This process challenges traditional views of radical, emancipatory pedagogy in both, institutional and non-institutional contexts. What was formerly known as progressive may all the sudden turn out as repressive or the other way around. But the necessary revaluation of pedagogical concepts also opens up potentials for new forms of collaborations between non-aligned initiatives in education, no matter whether they work inside or outside of institutions.