Pick a side.

 

Berlin stadium photo by @warwicklanguage CC BY

Time ticks on and increasingly I am reading more about the impact of technical developments. I have written of my reading and thoughts of the endless march of the techbros on my Espace Sisyphe blog. From my sideline position as a retired teacher and educational technologist it is getting harder and harder not to take a stand and refuse to tacitly approve of the many technologies that I have, in the past, used and recommended to others. This is particularly the case as I see the dilemmas faced by current practitioners who are both asked to promote and encourage the use of technology whilst also struggling to balance concerns about wellbeing and educational values for their students. It reminds me of a biblical citation from my distant past where I was expected : "to be in the world but not of the world"

Mozilla recently shared an excellent explainer video about the changed landscape online:

So far I have focussed on expressing my critical appraisal of educational technologies, maintaining that there are certain principles I would  apply when making technological choices:

- is your choice of activity using a digital tool/s going to help your learners without putting them in danger? (privacy,equity, safety)

- how sustainable is this activity? can you export and keep your content in a useable form? does the authoring tool acknowledge your rights and those of other contributors? (creativity,respect, environmental impact)

Now even these critical choices are more difficult to apply due in part to the ubiquity of so called AI which is often built in by default and the lack of transparency of the algorithms it employs. It is also clear that the Enshittification is well underway - the focus of those companies who had claimed to be offering educational value no longer value learners, but rather prioritise the money and power they now wield. Maybe that was always the case. We are increasingly suffering increased costs (including climatic changes and environmental destruction) as a result of their determination to achieve their techbros dreams. 

I recommend taking a listen to the Marsh family song (inserted below) about Silicon Valley and checking out the William Shockley tale on Wikipedia. 

There are still trustworthy networks out there but they need our support more than ever so don't forget to contribute to keep them alive! Think on about the photo I have used in this post too...

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

  

#eurocallgathering A meaningful mission on my road to retirement

 

Summer 2020 was to mark my the end of my teaching at Warwick. I plan to retire at year end and didn't want to leave the next cohort part way through their learning. These were just plans in my head, but they were of course affected by the arrival of a global pandemic - forecast for some years by experts and yet unexpected by the UK Government, which of course had their eyes only on the earning potential presented by their #brexit agenda. 

As it became apparent that we would not be able to travel easily, thoughts turned to how we could maintain some continuity in the Eurocall community which is almost entirely supported through an annual conference, already some way into planning to take place in Copenhagen. A difficult decision was made, we would not be able to go ahead. I had been co-opted to the board of Eurocall in 2018 and this organisation has a special place in my heart. 

As an early adopter of technology for language teaching and learning I had become aware early in my career that there was a group of academics who researched in this area. As a teacher, even as a head of subject I didn't have resources to enable me to join a physical conference. I read some of their work and attended local training events in Warwickshire but back then there was no easy access to information through the internet. In the 90's, when Eurocall was founded I used CD-ROMs such as Granville in my teaching. Later in my career, having moved to work in Higher Education I was able to track down Graham Davies, thanks to his ICT4LT website and twitter. I contacted him in 2010 as I had taken on a role to support staff development at Warwick Language Centre and he kindly agreed to speak to our teachers in his Second Life persona. Even with my very rudimentary skills in Second Life I was able to get my avatar to wear a Eurocall t-shirt! Warwick language tutors listened to Graham together and discussed how we could further embed technology in our teaching practice. I felt I was offering them the chance to connect with the leading edge of research and those with most experience. 

Graham and I shared a love of Europe and the need to support language learning:

UK withdraws from ECML, European centre created to support excellence in language teaching - reducing our influence over policy #mfl #sttf

— Teresa MacKinnon (@WarwickLanguage) October 28, 2011

Sadly Graham died 2 year later. I attended a celebration of his life in Second Life, a really moving event. He cared deeply for the fellowship he found in EuroCALL and I felt honoured to be able to pick up his legacy through working on the virtual strand blog. I felt that the challenges I had faced as a young teacher would not be going away. The opportunity to make the work of Eurocall more open and accessible to all who supported language learning was one I could not resist. For me this was personal

The idea of the #eurocallgathering event was born of the challenges presented by covid19 in 2020. 10 years after Graham had spoken to our teachers, I put a plan together to use the under-utilised capacity of our G Suite to ensure that we could still get the community together. I set up a site a hashtag and a You Tube channel and spent the summer months pulling it all together. Thanks to the support of the executive, the conference committee was able to transfer much of the planned event online. We didn't have the joy of visiting Copenhagen but we were able to share our work and and fellowship for two packed online days which will also leave a legacy behind them for others to find. 

The wide range of research which is generated by this community continues and #eurocallagathering only shows a small cross section and much of my work continues with UNICollaboration which was born out of the work supported by Eurocall. The stream is widening, as John Gillespie pointed out in his keynote.  

On the sustainability of teaching

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Recently I contributed to this final Future teacher 3.0 session by briefly sharing why I work in the open and support open educational practice (OEP) for teachers. I cannot separate that journey from the decision to learn more about ownership of digital learning objects and the use of Creative Commons licences. 
Sustainability is at the heart of that decision. Teaching as a profession is about creating the conditions for learning and growth and currently our wealthy economies are dominated by austerity and the drive to reduce regulation, resulting in open season on working terms and conditions. The gig economy continues to grow  and we will reap the negative effects of the societal impact.

The human cost of forgetting our humanity, our responsibility to one another, in favour of short term rewards is shocking. 

Gert Biesta: Teaching is not an intervention on objects but an encounter between subjects aimed at calling forth the subject-ness of students #CCCUedconf pic.twitter.com/DW9tKQIsC3

— Dr Lee Hazeldine (@CccuEd_blended) 7 February 2019

In my discipline the race to market language learning has decimated a real understanding of the fundamental fact that language is a human act, to improve you need to use it with real humans! 

Extracts from an interview for EFL teachers with Ross Thorburn.
A. What are the biggest changes that you've witnessed in how languages are taught and learned since you started your career in the 1960s? pic.twitter.com/6RHdkFsMI6

— Vivian Cook (@VivCookMC1) 16 February 2019

It may seem dull to learn how to operate and share resources online legally but at the heart of that learning is freedom which is central to the sustainability of teaching. Already inequality of access to language learning is growing, access to learning resources more widely is being limited according to wealth:

In #copyrightreform legislators should care about teachers, not publishing market, which is the “largest cultural industry in Europe”and“shows signs of a new phase of sustainable growth”according to a FEP report from 2017, @AxelVossMdEP, https://t.co/MvZCTg9Nf9 pic.twitter.com/0ewQJcoEUS

— communia (@communia_eu) 14 May 2018

These threats should be resisted by us all, but particularly by teachers. In a typical tongue in cheek tweet, Dave White commented on the difficulty of replicating human interaction through AI:

If only people were computers this would be a whole lot easier... I mean, people - it's almost like they aren't just a stack of maths in some meat.

— David White (@daveowhite) 3 July 2019 

To sustain a good quality of human life we must first value each other, whatever our talents, flaws, differences and challenges and then refuse to support changes which undermine our collective potential to thrive. 

The invisible permaculture of learning and teaching.

The importance of open educational practice.

I'm no artist as you can see on this my first attempt to sketch the role of open educational practice in supporting the sustainability of teaching using open educational resources. Clearly the image borrows from the water cycle. Admittedly it is stretching the analogy a little, the earth's natural climate is not driving this, rather it shows how the agency of individual practitioners can drive the sustainability of learning resources. OERs on their own would repose in their repository, we would see the sunlight glint from their surface and congratulate ourselves on a sea of wonderful "content". However, once practitioners get involved in the uptake, remixing, improving and shring of OERs, then the magic can really happen. Not only do the resources become more visible, moving further into the landscape. As they travel they bring new life, new connections between practitioners, new ideas, new ways of working. A vital tool in this permaculture is provided to the practitioners in the form of Creative Commons licences.

A culture of sharing has long existed in schools, the workload is intense and collegiality important in order to thrive. However, sharing a worksheet with a colleague does not always transfer to the digital domain. Back in 2009 my friend Kate Borthwick presented the results of work which was undertaken in the then languages subject centre around a repository called Language Box. A key difference in the interface of this system was the understanding that sharing is a social practice, it works best when we know who we are sharing with, when we get feedback and accreditation for our work. This emotional aspect, very familiar to those who engage with social media, seemed to increase the engagement of students who pilotted the resources, they were more likely to comment and remix the resources. 

Today I was able to participate in a Virtually Connecting session with participants in the #digped conference in the USA. This is another great way to use technology to embrace the human need to connect with others and thus enhance and intensify the international connections and discussions around teaching and learning in the age of the internet. I had been following the #digped discussions on twitter and it was clear to me that these folk (many of whom I was already following on twitter) share my passion for the intelligent use of technology and the use of a critical digital lens when implementing learning technologies. fortunately my social media skills are greater than my sketching so I will be actively continuing my sharing with these folk with the aim of ensuring that the digital agenda is not dominated by the "solution providers" who will be selling their AI driven systems as ways to save money in education but by the nature of human interactions which are so rich in often invisible or unseen ways.

“Why as a species are we so invested in the future of AI? Why aren’t we investing as much in people? That’s not a technical question. It’s a moral question.” @anya1anya #digped

— Digital Pedagogy Lab (@DigPedLab) 30 July 2018

As for the sketching, my PLN made me do it! Encouraged by them I will try new things, one day I may be a better sketchnoter, and even if that doesn't happen I will have confronted an aspect of my life that I neglected after a bad experience during my schooling.