Of genies and bottles...

 

Photo of cartoon in The Guardian November 23rd 2025


    

This time of year it is usual to reflect upon what you have achieved and perhaps set goals for the coming year. I'm going to look somewhat longer term as I feel we are reaching a point of no return and need to urgently address matters which could be catastrophic if they remain below the radar of our societal conscience. 

It is my privilege to continue to work with colleagues from UNICollaboration on virtual exchange and this has kept me researching the use of technical and digital tools for connecting educators and students across continents. I have reflected on my learning openly - as here on my Espace Sisyphe blog - showing my increasing concern about the power and influence of the wealthy controllers of many of our now limited numbers of tech platforms. Where the internet was once a place of lively, largely constructive debate and a source of help and community for many it is increasingly a dangerous, exploitative environment which requires greater skill if you are to avoid being targetted by nefarious forces. I also voluntarily work alongside the most amazing and well informed team of Future Teacher UK  to ensure that the best advice for teachers in terms of equitable access to education is shared openly and without commercial bias. 

So I feel I have been doing what I can post retirement from my position as an onlooker whilst maintaining my open education principles. I feel nonetheless that the sisyphian task is only getting more difficult as AI rapidly infects every aspect of our universe, becoming an existential threat on all that was great about the WWW. I found this interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee really worth a listen. His belief that things may all work out is tempting but I'm afraid the big money and the greed of the Broligarchy may defeat the higher minded "public good" ethos I embrace and wish to see sustained. I salute him for maintaining dialogue with those who would spoil the internet we loved, he is the better man.

There can be no doubt that the AI race is already exacting huge environmental harms at a time when politicians still fail to enact policies to address global warming and when many world leaders are happy to talk down the risks. With outside interference in elections, democracy itself is under fire. We are standing by and even complicit in the endless exploitation of our planet's resources - that is the water and the air we need to live - so that the super wealthy can fulfil their greedy, selfish desires.  Companies with greater wealth that many nation states push ahead with data centres whilst claiming that AI will save us all - believe me they have no interest in the rest of us!

 So what can I do? 

• Keep calling out the fake and the falsehoods
• Listen to trusted critical thinkers (such as Cory Doctorow, thanks Father Christmas!)
• Resist the hype and mock those who try to fool us
• Make decisions which take power away from the wealthy. 

In the immediate, I am moving more of my reflective writing away from online spaces and back to pens and paper in the coming years. I continue to review critically the use of social media and online platforms to find more ethical spaces. I am not afraid to call out the realities of poor personal security practices online and exclusionary teaching technologies, their impacts are so negative. Please allow time as you reflect to take a deeper, critical dive into the real consequencies of the digital actions and choices you make. It is not easy but you are not alone.

Photo of my copy which came this Christmas

  

Whatever next?

“Through the lens of critical digital pedagogy learning revolves around the idea of liberation. Liberation from oppression, but more specifically liberation from thought patterns (and educational practices) that limit human creativity and genius.” https://t.co/d9VfbAqBj1 #digped

— Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher) April 17, 2020

As our teaching term ended and we returned home for the Easter break in the hope of finishing some outstanding tasks and maybe some well earned rest suddenly all our hopes were overturned. COVID19 was about to change everything as the UK government suddenly decided this was a risk which needed more extreme measures. To be honest their response was too little too late but as ever the impact of crisis measures was yet again to put ordinary folk into the position of being "the elastic resource". This is an expression coined to me by one of my previous Heads of Department, a very wise Germanist. She would say whatever needs changing always relies on the workers being an "elastic resource" - stretching ever further, even when we are already over stretched. So it was again. All our carefully planned and prepared exam papers would need to be shelved and we were asked to create new assessment methods to fit a world where no-one could share a physical space, a new reality of social distancing and online "delivery". Otherwise we would not be doing our job. 

For me this reality of working remotely has been a way of life for at least 10 years so it didn't hold any of the fear I saw elsewhere. We (the language teaching community) have had at least 30 years of academic research into computer-assisted language (CALL) learning which has informed what we do and helped us to avoid some of the basic errors and misunderstandings which result from random application of shiny tech to teaching scenarios. Surely all would be fine. 

I had neglected to consider that assessment is still akin to a lesser known martial art in higher education. Often mediated solely through 3 hour writing sessions filling large halls with hoards of nervous students surveilled by a team of invigilators. It was, in retrospect, unsurprising that many were just looking to replicate such conditions online and move on. Of course that wouldn't work for language assessment, but it took a while before a plan was centrally agreed and meanwhile the elastic resource (ER) stretched further to plan, design and refine replacement activities which could be used to arrive at a magic number for those students who were hoping to graduate this year. Yes Jesse, aloting numbers remains a real issue in our competitive system which pits students against one another in order to identify those who are the most worthy of the best jobs. That's how capitalism views the world, on the basic of "merit". A fact we need to address more critically.

Social media was full of the fall out resulting from the call to #pivotonline.  Hurriedly deployed Microsoft teams reflected the urgency not of teachers but of managers to focus their ER to rise to the challenge before the Easter break despite the failure over past years to ensure that they were at least armed with the essential tool of assessment literacy! Fortunately some of us had undertaken some assessment training off our own bat, wanting to better understand what we do and why. I completed a PGCert in Assessment in 2014 which really opened my eyes but I still felt ill prepared to make this sudden shift and grew increasingly nervous when some colleagues started suggesting lengthy oral presentations to be prepared by students under conditions of which we were blissfully ignorant. It became clear over a few days that some of us would become ill, many would have to return to their home countries in different timezones, many would have to adjust to strict lockdown, caring responsibilities and even the possibilities of huge and painful loss. This would be nothing like business as usual. 

I found Dave Cormier's podcast really helpful and shared it with all those who were tasked with creating tools to measure performance under these new and bewildering conditions. 




Armed also with the learning shared at #OER20 on the theme of care in education I set about advocacy for a humane approach to assessment in every forum I could. I hope to have made a difference. Measurement may be important to some but it is not life and death. Supporting and facilitating lifelong learning matters.Yes Sean, we must first liberate ourselves to speak out and stand up for those to whom we are responsible. Otherwise we really are not doing our job. 

EuroCALL 2019: Critically open - designing for learning with your eyes open.

How do you choose your digital tools?

This coming week I will ask this question to those attending EuroCALL2019 in Louvain La Neuve, Belgium. Their input will update the word cloud above. I am interested to find out what or who influences our tool selection - do we use what we know? what we are told to use in our institution? what we have heard about from others?  When do we change tools? Does student interest or advocacy play a part? Are we aware of how some tool choices may negatively impact on student engagement? Do we think about whether a resource created using for example an authoring tool may not be accessible to some students? Perhaps we have limited choice.

I hope my presentation gives rise to discussion about how we can ask better questions when designing for learning in digital environments.

A favourite resource from Future Teacher 3.0 UK on this subject is available here.

You see sadly there is little training for web developers into the accessibility needs of those using learning resources, little awareness amongst learning designers and practitioners of the importance of accessibility and therefore the online resources which have been assumed to help support learning can sometimes just further marginalise  learners. Increasingly as the technology gets more complex, more "magical" thanks to algorithms and artificial intelligence we understand less of what is going on inside the black box. I believe that if we use digital tools we need to ask better questions, to uncover some of what is hidden from us. We need to use and promote critical digital literacy

I have been curating some of the conversations on twitter which relate to #criticaldigilit. I hope you find them useful.