Writing the history of the present

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Postdigital Science and Education on 22/07/2020. The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Teaching in The Age of Covid-19 ‘Teaching in The Age of Covid-19’ (Jandrić et al. 2020) presents 80 textual testimonies and 79 home workspace photographs submitted by 83 authors from 19 countries. Collected between 18 March and 5 May 2020, the testimonies and photographs describe uncanny feelings, daily experiences and challenges, and emergency solutions, developed by worldwide academics at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Supplemented with one editor’s introduction at the beginning, and another editor’s reflections at the end, these messy and unpredictable texts and images have now obtained the form of a ‘proper’ piece of academic writing. Yet appearance deceives; as we found out early into the project, this collection can be read in many different ways. At a time when local and global surveys are contributing insights on how the move to online learning and teaching is being experienced (Watermeyer et al. 2020), we explain why this particular collection is both different, but also complementary, to other studies. Each contribution to ‘Teaching in The Age of Covid-19’ (Jandrić et al. 2020) is a standalone authored work, that is both distinct and diverse. Some texts and images are small artistic masterpieces; others more focused to the ‘scientific’ side of things; and many contributions, neither particularly artistic nor very scholarly, provide a wealth of insights into the everyday life and practice of teachers and students during the very beginning of lockdown. We have a lot of appreciation for great arts, and new ideas are the bread and butter of academic inquiry. Yet ‘Teaching in The Age of Covid-19’ is not primarily about beautiful storytelling and / or novel ideas

Philosophy of education in the age of digital reason

In this conversation, Michael A. Peters discusses his philosophy of education in and for the age of digital media. The first part of the conversation classifies Michael Peters’ work in three interlocked themes: philosophy, political knowledge economy, and academic publishing. It explores the power of dialogue for philosophical inquiry, positions dialogue in relation to human learning, and analyses the philosophical thesis of postdisciplinarity. It assesses the role of “big data” and “learning analytics” in (educational) research, and links various approaches to inquiry with creativity. The second part of the conversation introduces the notion of “philosophy as pedagogy,” and introduces Michael Peters’ philosophy of technology. It inquires the role of educational philosophy in the contemporary network society, and explores links between postmodernism / poststructuralism and (neo)Marxism. The third part of the conversation explores the relationships between universalism and the Internet, locates digital postcolonialism, and looks into legacy of the Frankfurt School for learning in the age of digital media. Finally, it discusses Michael Peters’ lifelong fascination with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and outlines the main trajectories of Wittgenstein’s work into present and future of educational philosophy

Learning, creative col(labor)ation, and knowledge cultures

In this conversation, Michael A. Peters analyses the advent of knowl- edge cultures and their relationships to human learning. The first part of the conver- sation analyses social transformation towards the network society and links digital technologies to the making of the society of control. It analyses the dynamics between openness, capitalism, and anti-capitalism, and uses various recent examples to link that dynamics to democracy. The second part of the conversation links cybernetic capitalism to learning and knowledge production, and elaborates the movement of open education. Based on work of Paulo Freire, it develops the notion of openness as an (educational) virtue. It links openness and creativity, introduces Michael Peters’ political economy of academic publishing, analyzes the importance of editing for learning and knowledge production, and briefly introduces the concept of knowledge cultures. The third part of the conversation shows practical applications of these theoretical insights using the examples of two academic journals edited by Michael Peters: Knowledge Cultures (Addleton), and The Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (Springer). It explores epistemic consequences of peer-to-peer and wisdom- of-the-group approaches, introduces the notions of collective intelligence and col- (labor)ation, and outlines the main features of the new collective imagination. Finally, it shows that doing science is a privilege and a responsibility, and points towards transformation of academic labor from perpetuation of capitalism towards subversion

Postdigital-biodigital: an emerging configuration

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Educational Philosophy and Theory on 15/01/2021, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1867108 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.This dialogue (trilogue) is an attempt to critically discuss the technoscientific convergence that is taking place with biodigital technologies in the postdigital condition. In this discussion Sarah Hayes, Petar Jandrić and Michael A. Peters examine the nature of the convergences, their applications for bioeconomic sustainability and associated ecopedagogies. The dialogue paper raises issues of definition and places the technological convergence (‘nano-bio-info-cogno’) - of new systems biology and digital technologies at the nano level - in an evolutionary context to speculate, on the basis of the latest research, future possibilities. The paper also reviews these developments within familiar landscapes of posthumanism and postmodernism, raises the question of political bioeconomy, and the role of postdigital education within it

Dissolving the dichotomies between online and campus-based teaching: a collective response to The manifesto for teaching online (Bayne et al. 2020)

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching

The blockchain university: disrupting ‘disruption'

This is an accepted manuscript of a chapter published in Conceptualizing and innovating education with networked learning by Springer on 15/12/2021. Available online: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-85241-2_9 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.This paper explores the promise of disruption of higher education offered by latest platform technologies - a combination of mobile applications for connecting teachers and students and blockchain technology for secure transactions of information and money. We start with a brief examination of several generations of technological disruptions arriving from the Silicon Valley with a special focus to educational technology. Showing that these disruptions are primarily focused to furthering capitalist mode of production, we question whether the latest disruption could provide different results. Advertised as 'Uber for students, Airbnb for teachers', the Woolf University offers the seductive promise of radical transformation of higher education based on cooperative principles. Our analysis, which is based on early ideas about the development of the Woolf University, indicates that it has the potentials to offer cooperative learning to students, cooperative employment to academic workers, all the while retaining highest quality of teaching and learning modelled after ancient scholastic principles. On that basis, we conclude that the Woolf University, together with other adaptations of blockchain technology for educational purposes, does offer a lot of potential for fundamental disruption of higher education and should be closely watched in the times to come