Session: Value-driven Education: Free from Big Tech
https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/waardengedreven-onderwijsNaam/name Notulist: ....Datum/date: 27-06-2023 12:45Sprekersnamen/speaker names:
Shownotes
(mentioned links, books, podcasts, literature, etc.)Live notes (500-750 words)
The long arms of Big Tech have now reached the classroom. How can our educational system hold on to public values like autonomy, openness, and putting people first? During the session Free from Big Tech, a panel shared inspiring examples where value-driven infrastructure and academic resources remain central. What can we learn from them? In the beginning of the session, Wouter Tebbens shared some worries. Many apps are designed for addiction, for profiling users and making maximum profit. "Continuous interruptions on chats, and mobile phones, are providing serious concentration problems", he said. This offers a few serious concerns. "The biggest companies on earth are powerful companies which have a mononpoly on the free products we use, also in the educational market. Do we want our children to grow up with this? Market cocnentration means loss of sovereignty. And the idea that the market can regulate itself has been proven wrong. Schools are locked-in with the centralised learning systems the use."
Fortunately, resistance in many counties is slowly but surely emerging , Wouter said. New initiatives, policies and regulations are responding to this complex challenge. The Dutch Ministry for Education launched the website openleermateriaal.nl, for open source learning materials, for Resultaten DPIA op Google Workspace for Education en Chromebooks (ChromeOS) | Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaalexample. And Surfnet, a cooperative association of Dutch educational and research institutions, is currently doing a pilot on Mastodon. There's a Dutch policy for usage of open source network in the public sector, 'unless there is very strong reason not to', and there are several European regulation addressing this problem.
"There's an urgency for change, for moving away from Big Tech", Wouter said. "That is why it's usefull to hear some inspirational examples."
Taming Big TechHerman van der Plas is responsible for international affairs at the Dutch Ministry of Education and explained what he is working on. "In many countries, our colleagues aren't aware of what schools are using. So maybe we are ahead of others, as was also written in The New York Times article 'How the Netherlands is Taming Big Tech,'" he said. "The education sector itself cannot solve this; it should be addressed nationally. We are talking with the education sector about this. They are aware of the monopolies that are created. The big question is: make or buy? Maybe we should aim for a better buy, with a solid exit strategy and ownership of data. This issue is about leveling the playing field between the public and private sectors; for us, it's not about ruling out the private sector."
This is a crisisRecently, Douwe's son asked him what addiction actually was because he couldn't stop thinking about the computer game he was playing. "I talked to a neuroscientist recently, and he told me that the amygdala, an important part of our brain, is significantly smaller in children who look at screens frequently. We are changing people's brains with our technology; this is a big crisis."
Douwe's children attend a new school. "I went to the director and asked her if we can do things differently here. She was open to my suggestion. This now means that we handle our data ourselves, collaborate with 'good' clouds, and parents communicate with each other using Signal." However, this obviously takes a lot of time, Douwe explained. It involves maintaining servers, explaining their functions to other parents, and staying updated on different kinds of software. Four times a year, Douwe and other volunteers organize a debate on this topic. "Education is a right, but children are eventually forced into it. We have many ideas about creating a safe environment, such as good chairs and clean air, but we hardly think about a safe digital environment. That is crazy."
Open source & education, a story. English teacher Wouter de Jong introduced Moodle at his school. "The learning management system we were using annoyed me, so I did some research and approached our headmaster," he told us. "She was interested, partly because Moodle was cheaper, open source, and had better features. It also helped that I was an expert at our relatively small, independent school. I knew what I wanted as a teacher."
He chose Moodle because there is a separation between the distributor and developer, it is open source, and it guarantees the longevity of content owned by teachers. However, Wouter also experienced a few bottlenecks. It feels a bit clunkier, and the user experience of a system like Microsoft Teams might be better. "And it's also less trendy and less familiar."
Wouter is currently running a pilot with Moodle at his school. He also shared his long-term vision: "We should have open access, open standards, and open source. All information and everything funded by the public should be accessible to the public. We don't all have to use Moodle, as long as we use something that allows for easy transfer. And we need the government's support for this; teachers, students, and parents cannot face Big Tech alone."
Democratic Digitalisation Another inspiring example comes from Simona Levi, the director of Xnet, an activist project working on and proposing advanced solutions around digital rights and democracy. She is also the main author of the "Proposal for a Sovereign and Democratic Digitalization of Europe." The report identifies serious shortcomings in the foundations on which societies are being digitalized. "Our basic layer of digital daily life is violated every day, including in education, by using non-auditable, non-interoperable, and non-controllable digital tools."
In the report, Levi and her colleagues promote a comprehensive agile infrastructure for everyday digital activities that combine different tools like Nextcloud, WordPress, Moodle, DuckDuckGo, and many more. "We make them work together as if they were one," she said. The DD – Virtual Learning Environment is currently being implemented in eleven schools in Barcelona. "It works," Simona said. "But it's now up to other institutions to proceed with it. I'm an activist and not a service provider, so we hope that the code will be safeguarded by the EU, allowing every tech company to provide it as a service."
A French digital strategy for educationAlexis Kauffman works for the French Ministry of Education, focusing on free software. He discussed the "Digital Strategy for Education 2023-2027," which was published last January. "It is my dream to build the Wikipedia of educational resources," he said. "Our main idea is to offer authoring tools, free from Big Tech, to teachers and students. Tools that are based on robust open-source software."
With one million teachers and ten million students, Alexis has a lot of work to do. However, he and his colleagues are making great progress. "Our website apps.education.fr, which features tools like BigBlueButton, Nextcloud, and Peertube, is already being used by ten percent of our teachers." Other parts of the strategy include the implementation of a tool for continuous training of teachers, a tool to introduce students to coding, and a platform for free educational tools. "By using these four things, we can do without Google Workspace or Office 365. What is most interesting for me is that by doing this, we are contributing to the open-source community."
