Sipping a glass of wine on the terrace last night, I thought about writing an article about proxies. I've become a bit obsessed about proxies, ever since looking at the way Learning Analytics seems to so often equate learning with achievement in examinations.
But then by chance this morning I ended up looking at the text of Ivan Illich's 1969 publication 'Deschooling Society'. And I found in the first chapter Illich talks about about how we "confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.
He goes on to say pupils' "imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question."
This seems an apposite comment on how the use and analysis of big data is being developed in the present period.
I stumbled on the Illich quote from a Twitter link to an exercise on the CLMOOC lets be creative together website. They ask "What would Ivan Illich think about CLMOOC?" and go on to suggest "we find activities like this all the more enjoyable and enriching when a variety of voices join the conversation. So this is an open invitation to the internet to join us as we use Hypothes.is to annotate an online copy of Deschooling Society together."
I have not seen Hypothes.is before but it looks pretty nifty. I have never understood just why collective annotation has never quite taken off. It seems to me a great format for sharing and developing knowledge together. And I think Illich would have liked it.
Hello Graham – lovely to see this post. I’m one of the clmooc folk. Do join in with us 🙂