Is digital life without the big five possible?

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Over the last year I have made a few attempts to limit my exposure to some of the tech giants services and make it harder for them to track everything I do. I have stopped using Chrome as a browser, stopped searching with Google, deleted Google maps from my mobile, reviewed all the privacy settings in my mobile and deleted a lot of apps. However this all seems rather futile after reading and watching a fascinating series of reports by Kashmir Hill, Goodbye big five. She decided to try to live without the big five tech giants one week at a time: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. My attempts are simply superficial because between them these five companies control virtually everything on the internet. Services that we use every day and never even associate with the big five use their cloud hosting services, map functions and other tracking and ad-based services.

Hill took on one giant at a time and with the help of an expert colleague blocked all traffic from known IP addresses connected to Amazon, Google etc. Amazon alone controls over 23 million addresses which means that living without them is extremely difficult. So just stopping using the companies main site is not going to get them out of your life. Virtually everything we do online is dependent on five gigantic companies.

It’s not just logging off of Facebook; it’s logging off the countless websites that use Facebook to log in. It’s not just using DuckDuckGo instead of Google search; it’s abandoning my email, switching browsers, giving up a smartphone, and living life without mapping apps. It’s not just refusing to buy toilet paper on Amazon.com; it’s being blocked from reading giant swaths of the internet that are hosted on Amazon servers, giving up websites and apps that I didn’t previously know were connected to the biggest internet giant of them all.

The most interesting week of her experiment was when she blocked all five and tried to live with a non-connected digital camera, a no-frills Nokia mobile and a PC running open source OS Linux (watch the video about this week below). Suddenly she had almost nothing to listen to or watch since services like Spotify and Netflix are dependent on the big five. All streaming services were off limits as were most communication channels. Sending messages and files became extremely difficult because even if there are open alternatives they tend to be harder to use, less attractive in design and the people you need to communicate with are not on them. Hill calls the final stage of her detox as digital veganism and in the film below she interviews a tech expert who lives that way.

Basically we have allowed these companies to expand without any regulation and now when they control most of the internet it seems a bit late to try to fix things. Attempts are being made, most notably in the EU with, among other things, the recent GDPR legislation but there are few signs that the present US administration is considering any moves. The moral of the story from Kashmir Hill's experience is that we need to at least to become more aware of how dependent we are on the big five and try to limit that exposure to some extent. A certain amount of digital detox is recommended for all but at the moment it seems virtually impossible to escape completely.

Some final words from Hill's article series:

I went through the digital equivalent of a juice cleanse. I hope I’m better than most dieters at staying healthy afterward, but I don’t want to be a digital vegan. I want to embrace a lifestyle of “slow Internet,” to be more discriminating about the technology I let into my life and think about the motives of the companies behind it. The tech giants are reshaping the world in good and bad ways; we can take the good and reject the bad.

How would you change education if you could choose?

"Study" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by johnlsl

What would the education system look like if you had the power and resources to change it? We have all been discussing educational change for years at conferences, in publications, communities and blogs, pointing out shortcomings of the present system and proposing new strategies, teaching methods, organisation forms, platforms, devices and tools as possible solutions. But what do we actually want? What would our schools and colleges look like if you could choose? That was the basis of a panel discussion at this week's ICDE Lifelong learning summit 2019 in Lillehammer, Norway that I attended. So I decided to take up the challenge and try to briefly outline what sort of education system I would like to see. This is very much a first draft with some general principles but maybe the starting point for further discussion and reflection.

Schools and universities are part of society but also oases for reflection and perspective.
Education must become more integrated into the surrounding community with more opportunities for pupils and students to get involved in real community projects and work experience. This is already happening but must be further strengthened to let students apply their knowledge and skills in activities of real value and learn to work in a variety of different fields and with a wide range of people. Similarly companies and local authorities need to be more visible in the schools and colleges. At the same time it is also vital that educational institutions are also places where you are able to step back from the world around you; an oasis for reflection. We must not allow our education system to become simply training grounds for the labour market and there must be space for studies in philosophy and the arts to provide a healthy counter-balance. Sometimes we need an ivory tower to sit in for a while.

From bubbles to an ecosystem
Our education system is made up of a lot of bubbles. We divide schools rigidly into age-group bubbles as well as dividing the curriculum into subject bubbles, thus creating artificial barriers for the sake of administrative convenience. We need to find new ways to let age groups and subjects interact naturally, learning to use a range of knowledge and skills to solve problems together. This ties in with the increasing involvement of the community in education and of education in the community outlined above. Of course, this continues all through life and the concepts of school and college evaporate into a fluid education ecosystem for lifelong learning. Everyone in society is engaged in learning activities all through life and schools and colleges provide a framework for this. A classroom full of 12 year-olds will in this context become a rather absurd notion from the past.

Inclusion
Schools and colleges should be spaces that are open to all sections of society and where we have a chance to learn to live and work with each other. If we want to have a tolerant and cohesive society we need to foster this in our schools. Technology can help us here with tools that make learning more accessible to all and allow us to collaborate not only on-site but with colleagues from anywhere in the world. Concepts like virtual mobility allow our students to learn to work with students from many different cultures and circumstances. Technology can allow people with special needs to participate more fully than ever before in school and college work. In addition we have more teachers and other professionals who are trained in supporting people with special needs and can help to make our schools more inclusive.

Distance is no object
Today there is a vast range of online and distance learning opportunities in most countries in the world. This will continue to flourish but we need governments in particular to provide funding for  support structures to help disadvantaged people and people in remote areas to take advantage of opportunities like this. Combinations of online courses and local support are essential if we really want more inclusive education. Universities need incentives to open up their courses to the wider society and create new paths to higher education. Technically we can widen access to education but the educational systems are not quite ready for the challenges.

Technology is important but so is the absence of it
When I started thinking about this I realised that today I do not want to put technology in a headline role in my dreams of a future education system. Technology has a supporting role in all of the above but should complement and enhance human contacts. As technology becomes ubiquitous in society the need arises to find spaces where we learn to survive without it. Even if artificial intelligence will soon learn to write novels, compose music, solve complex problems, play chess, speak any language and drive our transport we will still want to be able to do these things ourselves as well. Schools of the future will need to create offline time where these skills can be learnt and practiced. Learning how to switch between plugged in and unplugged is a key literacy for the future.

All these ingredients are already present today to varying degrees around the world. I would just like us to work together to magnify them.

Update
After posting this I realised that I had forgotten to mention the theme of so many of my posts over the last couple of years - digital literacies and data security. Schools and colleges need to be able to make informed choices about the platforms and tools they use and ensure that students' data is protected from commercial interests. Similarly we need to help students make wise choices about how they use tools and services and be aware of the opportunities and limitations involved.

Massive for-profit online courses

"Paywall" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by GioSaccone

I wrote a few years ago that it was time to forget the acronym MOOC and realise that this umbrella term was too limited to cover the number of variations trying to shelter under it. Today a majority of so-called MOOCs are just regular online courses that can cost you quite a lot of money if you want any kind of certification or even credit for your efforts. Even the content is disappearing behind paywalls as the platforms focus on return on investment. One major platform, the Australian Open2study has recently closed down completely. Of course there are still genuinely open MOOCs delivered in a spirit of sharing and outreach, but they are generally low-profile and hard to discover unless you know where to look. Free and open education sounded great but in the end someone has to pay.

A possible obituary for the MOOC as we imagined it appears in an article in University World News, MOOCs fail in their mission to disrupt higher education. It refers to a new study from MIT in the journal Science, The MOOC pivot, that examined MOOC statistics from the platform edX and found that the vast majority of participants do not return to take other courses and that there has been virtually no change in the extremely low completion rates in the last six years. Furthermore there are no real signs that MOOCs have succeeded in reaching the original intended target group, those who are unable to access traditional higher education. On the contrary the participants are mostly affluent professionals with a traditional university background and of course they are the people most likely to be able to pay for certificates, tuition and so on.

Rather than creating new pathways at the margins of global higher education, MOOCs are primarily a complementary asset for learners within existing systems.

The main reason why non-traditional learners are not attracted to MOOCs is that they are unfamiliar with the concept of online learning and need support and encouragement, generally face-to-face, in order to get on board successfully. This is where most MOOCs fall short since they often assume that the learners have good digital and study skills.

Reich and Ruipérez-Valiente point out that there is a basic problem if MOOC providers are competing to undercut traditional providers in this market and attract the less traditional consumers – potential students from less well-off families, especially from families with no history of attending higher education – since research shows they typically perform worse in online courses and most need human support in the form of tutors and peer learning groups.

The courses formerly known as MOOCs are now competing with all other online courses and degrees and are thereby part of the system that the media hype claimed they were going to disrupt. Of course the universities offering these courses have learned a lot from the experience and there are now alternative and more flexible pathways to higher education, but I don't think the results are particularly disruptive. The people who have been unable to access higher education due to socio-economic factors are still unable to access higher education. If we have to use acronyms let's call them MOCS, minus the word open.