It’s time to re-reboot the podcast, starting by resurrecting the audio from the Reclaiming Educational Technology interviews that were recorded during a hackathon event hosted at the University of Mary Washington after Open Education 2014.

I keep coming back to these episodes, even 5 years later, as they are full of amazing insights by incredibly passionate and interesting people. I’ll be posting the audio from all 4 episodes shortly…

This episode features:

• Audrey Watters - HackEducation.com
• Kin Lane - APIEvangelist.com
• Martha Burtis - University of Mary Washington (but now at the Open CoLab at Plymouth State University)

Direct link to audio file

Interviews were conducted by D’Arcy Norman and David Kernohan.

Video and audio were recorded by Andy Rush.

Amateur editing by D’Arcy Norman.

Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello and welcome to the Taylor Institute Learning Technologies podcast. My name is D’Arcy Norman, and I’m the host for this series. After a very long hiatus, I am kick-starting this podcast and starting with actually repurposing some audio from some interviews recorded shortly after Open Education 2014 where a large group of people gathered at the University of Mary Washington and kind of a EdTech Hackathon. 

And so David Kernahan and I were able to interview some of these people. We thought we’d take advantage of having all these amazing people in one place and sort of pick their brains on a few topics. The video and audio were recorded by Andy Rush and I added them together into some semblance of coherence. 

So we have four episodes. This one is episode number one. The topic is the business and politics of EdTech and features commentary from Audrey Waters from hackeducation.com, from Kin Lane from theapievangelist.com, and Martha Burtis, who was at University of Maryland Washington at the time and is now at the Open CoLab at Plymouth State University. So without further ado, here is episode one of the Reclaiming Educational Technology Series, The Business and Politics of EdTech. My name’s Audrey Waters. I’m a writer. I write about education technology. and I think contrary to what a lot of education technology journalists do, I think I’m actually, I try to be critical and ask questions about what we’re doing and why, instead of just sort of cheerleading, cheerleading tech. I think that one of the things that education technology does is it has in many ways reinforces some of the really traditional practices of education. It doesn’t have to, but that’s sort of what we’re faced with, right? So we see education as a process in which traditionally education is a process where students’ minds are filled with knowledge from above. The teachers, the administrators, the university sort of decides the curriculum, tells them what they need to know, open up their brains, pour the information in, craft them as sort of models in a particular discipline or for a particular profession and send them on their way. It’s sort of a traditional typical view, stereotypical view, if you will, of what education does. 

It sort of churns out students as objects. And I think that there’s, you know, a different tradition that sees students as having more agency, that in order to really, that we should recognize that learning is something that should be self-motivated and driven by your interests and your passions and that you really understand things when you construct knowledge yourself instead of sort of being told what to know that you have to make this process of discovery. And so, you know, how do we use technology to generate and foster that? I think most of the time what we see is technology used and technology that positions students as objects. So I’m really interested in the projects that make students at the center, that give students the power and the agency to build, construct, make their own connections, do their own work, be in control of their own learning, instead of just these cogs in the university or in the school wheel. It’s interesting to see how a lot of those phrases get picked up by Silicon Valley, sort to brand their thing as sounding more progressive, right? And I think that there’s something about technology that we see it as being futuristic, right? So it’s somehow necessarily progressive. Doesn’t mean it’s politically progressive, but I think, particularly in the United States, we see as anything that’s technological means that it’s future facing. So more technology is towards the future, something that’s moving towards the future. I see the tech sector that they talk about being user-centric, but that just means I think that it’s easier for them to get you to hand over more data to them. I think that they talk about openness, but really that means that the sign-up process is easier so that they get you onboarded more simply. They talk about free, but it’s not free as in freedom, it’s free as in, again, like how much of your data can you hand over to these companies. So I think that they’re used, I think they find ways to make themselves sound like they’re doing students, doing society a great service, but I’m pretty skeptical if that’s really what the motivation is. So my name’s Kin Lane. I’m the API evangelist. What I do is I’m a software engineer by trade, but for the just been studying this phenomenon known as APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, which is a feeling, you know, not just many of the websites we use on a daily basis, the Amazons and Googles and Twitters of the world, but rapidly driving all the mobile apps that we use for those same platforms, but also, you know, other mobile-specific applications. So I study, pay attention to the technical of it all, but also what I consider the business and politics of APIs, which cover a lot of ground, but definitely some hot button topics that are really pressing today. So for me, APIs are about access to resources, whether it be your tweets on Twitter, your wall posts on Facebook, and these APIs are providing ways of building applications, mobile applications, on top of the resources that are generated by these platforms and these resources are basically the exhaust of the citizens, all of us, you know, all of us Facebook users, Twitter users, Google users, every search we do, we’re generating resources for these companies and that’s how they make their money. So the business of APIs is about well how much do I actually allow for accessing of these resources so that I as Google, can still make money, but I can allow other people to build applications for my users on top of this data. So there’s a fine balance there in how you open up access so people can build things, innovate on top of Google searches, Twitter data, but then how much do you restrict that access so you’re not giving away all of your value as Google or Twitter. 

Twitter started as a very open platform. It was just a text box that you could put tweets into and follow friends. And they opened up an API and everybody came and built everything we know as Twitter. 

The iPhone app, the Android app, the hashtag, everything you know as Twitter today was built by the community by APIs. 

But over the course of the last seven years, Twitter has slowly tightened the screws down because they have investors to the tune of 1.4 billion dollars that say, well, we have to start generating revenue from this exhaust that you’ve created and your community’s created. So the business, the technology of that is opening up the APIs and people building things. The business of it is people building things for you for free on top of this and people generating these resources for free. The politics of it is, well, how do I now change my terms of service so I can resell this data to other companies? I can rate limit developers who are building things that may threaten me as Twitter. So I can rate limit. I can change my terms of service. I can adjust my privacy policies. I can adjust my pricing. 

So those are all the politics of APIs. and they’re very subtle and unless you’re in the industry studying it you really don’t know these things are going on and and especially on platforms like Twitter that don’t actually have a business model besides advertising you are the product you know and people don’t realize that I am Martha Burtis I work in teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington and currently I am director of the digital knowledge center center, which is a new center in our division. I think that higher education does an abysmal job of contextualizing for students why online spaces in the digital world matters. And I think because we invest in these big tools and systems, we think that that’s what we should be talking to our students about and that’s what matters and those systems and tools are really sort of somewhat irrelevant outside of the walls of our schools. 

So for me what matters is, this isn’t a couple of lines, for me what matters is is that we’re recognizing the importance of this for our students and our faculty and that we’re doing the hard work to to make sure that they have opportunities to really explore and interrogate these spaces. We’ve worked with students for years, but it’s always been through the kind of channels of visiting classes and working through faculty. And this is a way for us to work with students one-on-one, helping them through a peer support mechanism. And I really hope that it allows us to get at some of these issues at a more grassroots roots level at the institution, where students see that other students care about this and this matters. We have like an amazing group of student workers now who work in the center and who work with their friends and peers. And I think that kind of modeling and that kind of dynamic isn’t something we can easily reproduce from where we sit, but it is something we can enable and we can encourage through something like this. I mean, I think that this is a real challenge, and I think that this is always, I think, going to be a challenge around education, right? How do you balance an individual’s needs and individual’s desire to sort of explore and make connections with a community and with society’s expectations of what you need to know, whether that community is a community of scholars or sort of society at large. I mean, I think that that is always the balancing act around education, because it is not just about intellectual development, but it’s about your social development as well. I think that right now we’re seeing a lot of the effort being on being more and more individualistic. So what matters is, what matters are your own individual needs so that when you graduate from college you can make a lot of money. And the value of education is changing from being, we’re all going to participate in this thing because we think it’s a public good. So I think that there is always going to be that tension between the expectations of a community, an institution, as a scholarship, and the individual. I mean really, you know, A, just helping higher educational institutions understand this, whether it be from a top-down level like I’m doing with BYU, straight out of the CIO’s office, going through and making sure every system across campus has an API, so that other departments and faculty and students can access course catalogs, schedules, buildings, staff directories, every aspect of campuses. operation should be programmable and accessible to students in a safe and secure and privacy sensitive way. So that kind of work at BYU from a top down is very important. I would say I’m doing similar work with folks at Berkeley, but it’s a more bottom up. The students have demanded APIs. You know, IT has no interest in opening up systems, which, again, is a very common political problem that we face. But the students are like, no, we’re going to scrape your catalog. We’ve made our own API. You might as well just give us a real one, because we’re building apps that students are using already to plan their education. So why do we have to scrape it off the website and do it in these insecure ways? Give us the actual resources. So those top, down, and bottom up are very important to me.