The Digital University: A Dialogue and Manifesto

380 Pages·2018·1.524 MB·English

by  Michael A. Peters & Petar Jandrić

Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
The University in the Epoch of Digital Reason
1. ‘Internet Universality’: Human Rights and
Principles for the Internet 11
2. Technological Unemployment: Educating for the
Fourth Industrial Revolution 27
3. The University in the Epoch of Digital Reason:
Fast Knowledge in the Circuits of Cybernetic Capitalism 37
4. Educational Web Science 59
5. Digital Archives in the Cloud: Collective Memory,
Institutional Histories, and the Disclosure of Information 69
6. The Political Economy of Informational Democracy 79
7. The Eco-University in the Green Age 95
8. W ho Is Really in Charge of Contemporary Education?
People and Technologies in, Against, and Beyond the
Neoliberal University 105
vi | The Digital University: A Dialogue and Manifesto
Collective Intelligence and the Co-creation of Social Goods
9. Conversation With Fred Turner, U.S. Historian of
Digital Technologies: From the Electronic Frontier
to the Anthropocene 129
10. Toward a Political Theory of Social Innovation:
Collective Intelligence and the Co-creation of Social Goods 147
11. Toward a Philosophy of Academic Publishing 165
12. Collective Writing: An Inquiry Into Praxis 203
13. Conversation With Pierre A. Lévy, French Philosopher
of Collective Intelligence 229
14. Inside the Global Teaching Machine: MOOCs,
Academic Labour, and the Future of the University 239
Digital Teaching, Digital Learning, and Digital Science
15. Philosophy of Education in the Age of Digital Reason 261
16. Learning, Creative Col(labor)-ation, and Knowledge Cultures 281
17. Digital Reading: From the Reflective Self to Social Machine 301
18. The Digital Self 317
19. A Vision of the Digital University: Radical Openness,
Creative Labour, and the Co-production of Symbolic Goods 337
20. Prologue to the Digital University Manifesto 355
The Digital University Manifesto 363
Index 367
Acknowledgements
This book contains various previously published articles. We are grateful for the
permission to republish these articles, with and without changes, to the following
publishers:
Hayes, S., & Jandrić, P. (2014). Who is really in charge of contemporary education? People and
technologies in, against and beyond the neoliberal university. Open Review of Educational
Research, 1(1), 193–210.
Jandrić, P., Devine, N., Jackson, E., Peters, M., Lăzăroiu, G., Mihaila, R., … Brighouse, S. (2017).
Collective writing: An inquiry into praxis. Knowledge Cultures, 5(1).
Peters, M. A. (2004). The political economy of informational democracy. The International Journal
of Learning, 14(6), 1–36.
Peters, M. A. (2014). ‘Internet universality’: Human rights and principles for the Internet. Knowl-
edge Cultures, 2(3), 15–28.
Peters, M. A. (2014). The university in the epoch of digital reason fast knowledge in the circuits of
cybernetic capitalism. In P. Gibbs, O.-H. Ylijoki, C. Guzmán-Valenzuela, & R. Barnett (Eds.),
Universities in the time of flux: An exploration of time and temporality in university life. London:
Routledge.
Peters, M. A. (2015). Educational web science. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(11), 1093–1099.
Peters, M. A. (2015). Interview with Pierre A. Lévy, French philosopher of collective intelligence.
Open Review of Educational Research, 2(1), 259–266.
viii | The Digital University: A Dialogue and Manifesto
Peters, M. A. (2016). Inside the global teaching machine: MOOCs, academic labour and the future
of the university. Learning and Teaching, 9(2), 66–88.
Peters, M. A. (2017). Technological unemployment: Educating for the fourth industrial revolution.
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(1): 1–6.
Peters, M. A. (2016). The eco-university in the green age. Review of Contemporary Philosophy, 15,
60–69.
Peters, M. A., & Heraud, R. (2015). Toward a political theory of social innovation: collective intel-
ligence and the co-creation of social goods. Journal of Self-Governance and Management Eco-
nomics, 3(3), 7–23.
Peters, M. A., & Jandrić, P. (2015). Learning, creative col(labor)ation, and knowledge cultures.
Review of Contemporary Philosophy, 14, 182–198.
Peters, M. A., & Jandrić, P. (2015). Philosophy of education in the age of digital reason. Review of
Contemporary Philosophy, 14, 161–182.
Peters, M. A., & Jandrić, P. (2016). Digital reading. Review of Contemporary Philosophy, 15, 153–
170.
Peters, M. A., Jandrić, P., Irwin, R., Locke, K., Devine, N., Heraud, R., … Roberts, P. (2016).
Toward a philosophy of academic publishing. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(14),
1401–1425.
Turner, F., & Jandrić, P. (2015). From the electronic frontier to the anthropocene: A conversation
with Fred Turner. Knowledge Cultures, 3(5), 165–182.
Introduction
An epoch is a period of time marked by distinctive features. In relation to knowl-
edge, an epoch marks the realm of accepted theory and discourse and adopts the
notion of epistêmê that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge with
the possibility of distinguishing true from false statements. Foucault is famous for
defining epistêmês. In The Order of Things (1994) he follows a long line of schol-
ars and thinkers who adopt a structuralist or systems understanding of beliefs
and assumptions that organize scientific practices and worldviews. Thomas Kuhn
similarly uses the term ‘paradigms’ (Kuhn, 1970), and Jean Piaget (1968) looks
to genetic epistemology to provide a similar framework. Heidegger classifies the
whole of Western philosophy through the organizing concept of ‘Being.’ In ‘Being
and Power: Heidegger and Foucault,’ Hubert L. Dreyfus provides the following
insightful comparison:
At the heart of Heidegger’s thought is the notion of being, and the same could be said
of power in the works of Foucault. The history of being gives Heidegger a perspective
from which to understand how in our modern world things have been turned into objects.
Foucault transforms Heidegger’s focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became
subjects. And, just as Heidegger offers a history of being, culminating in the technological
understanding of being, in order to help us understand and overcome our current way of
dealing with things as objects and resources, Foucault analyzes several regimes of power,
2 | The Digital University: A Dialogue and Manifesto
culminating in modern bio-power, in order to help us free ourselves from understanding
ourselves as subjects. (Dreyfus, 2008)
Heidegger claimed that we were entering a final epoch which he called the tech-
nological understanding of being although he does not specify digital being or
digital reason as the responsible mechanisms. As Dreyfus makes clear, technology
belongs to the last stage in the history of the Western understandings of being
by replacing poiesis with a world of digital control that leads to more flexible and
efficient ordering of symbolic resources.
In Crossing the Postmodern Divide, Borgmann (1992) extends Heidegger’s
analysis to discuss the emergence of soft technologies that focus on the produc-
tion of flexible and adaptive devices in the shifts from production of goods to
information service industries. Such shifts ultimately replace the limitations of
the real world through simulations and simulacra that are completely under our
control. He thereby extends the concept of hyperreal and hyperactivity to society
as a whole defining it as “a state of mobilization where the richness and variety
of social and cultural pursuits, and the natural pace of daily life, have been sus-
pended to serve a higher, urgent cause” (Borgmann, 1992: 14).
Defining the Epoch of Digital Reason
Digital computers operate by manipulating on/off signals to implement logic
functions. Over time, the means to generate on/off signals have changed from
early mechanical devices to transistors, integrated circuits and beyond. These
improvements brought about faster and smaller components that have trans-
formed computers into everyday devices. While the means of on/off signals are
constantly changing, the original logic remains based in the binary system of ones
and zeros which conforms to a set of rules invented by George Boole in 1850,
where three operations (s AND, OR, and NOT) can perform all logic functions.
However, Boole’s system had remained largely unused and unacknowledged, until
Claude Shannon applied Boolean algebra to the design of logic circuits using
electromechanical relays.
The post-war period defines the first cybernetics era through the use of
constructed computer circuits from mechanical or electrical ‘gates’—from
contact relays, through transistors, to microprocessors, silicon chips and inte-
grated circuits. This definition is correct, because digital computers are indeed
the embodiment of our twenty-first century technology. However, the central
Introduction | 3
historical difficulty in defining the epoch of digital reason based on the devel-
opment of digital logic is that many elements of this technology date from
the prehistory of the first gears and wheels used as switches and Boole’s logic
system—and this prehistory had been instrumental in setting the stage for the
cybernetics revolution that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.
A possible way to go about this difficulty is to say that digital logic has arrived
to age with the development of integrated circuits which are currently reduced
to less than 14 nanometers (Nobel Prize, 2016), and which have enabled pro-
duction of digital computers as we know them today. Technically, this solution
is fairly arbitrary. In terms of the relationships between digital technologies and
the society, however, this solution seems quite plausible.
In the first instance, the epoch of digital reason is defined by the technical
application and improvement of the embodiment of digital logic in electronic
circuits; and then by its spread and distribution within networks to define the
exchange of information between machines and databases. As David M. Berry
(2011: 2) argues: “networked software, in particular, encourages a communica-
tive environment of rapidly changing feedback mechanisms that tie humans and
non-humans together into new aggregates.” And he observes:
faster processing speeds are crucial for them to be data-mined for predictive, marketing,
and social monitoring purposes by governments, corporations, and other large organisa-
tions, often without our knowledge or consent. This transforms our everyday lives into
data, a resource to be used by others, usually for profit, which Heidegger terms stand-
ing-reserve. (Heidegger 1993a: 322)
In its most pervasive form, the computer provides the full spectrum of modali-
ties of the text, still and moving images, sound, and mathematic representation
into one master medium that can electronically create, store, redisplay, publish
and distribute stored information by exploiting the communication between
computers (Van der Weel, 2011). These core features create a machine-readable,
infinitely manipulable text and prevent its closure. The new digital order has a
number of social characteristics including great interactivity, interconnectivity,
automation of social functions, and lack of privacy. The notion of the social web
is well advanced, and Berners-Lee uses the notion of ‘social machine’ (Hendler
& Berners-Lee, 2010) as a construction to capture its complexity, relations, and
social characteristics. Some scholars argue that this late development represents
the growth of knowledge spaces and its inevitable democratisation.
The epoch of digital reason—a term that embraces all these developments in a
Kantian-styled formulation—is the general basis for understanding the nature of
4 | The Digital University: A Dialogue and Manifesto
contemporary human cultural evolution. The historical inventions of writing and
then printing had defined the literate minds of their epochs, and the digital text
defines a reordering of the digital mind. This is an ontologico-technical shift that
transforms all aspects of writing, reading, viewing, learning and publishing, which
comprise the core academic practices which define the modern university. The
university that merely applies information systems without understanding their
nature, their history, or projected futures, remains a prisoner of the age. In order
to gain the capacity to transcend limitations of our times, the university needs to
reinvent itself in and for the age of the digital reason. It is within these circum-
stances that this book offers various insights into the nature of the contemporary
university. Using various forms of col(labor)ation and dialogue, the book offers
analyses and directions for future development of the digital university.
Structure of This Book
This book is divided into three sections. In the first section, ‘The university in the
epoch of digital reason,’ we present various insights into the nature of the con-
temporary university that we have developed over the recent years. Starting from
questions regarding human rights and principles for the Internet, we inquire what
it means to educate for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We proceed to explore
various relationships between knowledge creation and cybernetic capitalism, and
then narrow our inquiry to educational web science. Looking at digital archives
in the cloud we examine the relationships between collective memory, institu-
tional histories and the disclosure of information. We explore political economy
of informational democracy, analyse the role of eco-university in the green age,
ask who is really in charge of contemporary education, and develop an active
approach to the relationships between humans and technologies.
The second section, ‘Collective intelligence and the co-creation of social
goods,’ starts with a dialogue about individualism and collectivism in the history
of digital technologies with the historian Fred Turner. We move on to explore
relationships between collective intelligence and the co-creation of social goods,
and develop preliminary ground for a political theory of social innovation. The
next two chapters present results of our experiments in collective writing con-
ducted with the New-Zealand based organisation The Editors’ Collective founded
by Michael Peters. The first collectively written chapter explores possible routes
towards contemporary philosophy of academic publishing, and the second col-
lectively written chapter explores authors’ self-reflections about the process of
Introduction | 5
collective writing. We explore some of these issues in more depth through a phil-
osophical dialogue with Pierre A. Lévy, French philosopher of collective intelli-
gence. Using the case of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), we explore
issues pertaining to academic labour and the future of the university.
The first and the second section of this book contain works that have either
been written by one of the authors, or have been co-written by one of the authors
and somebody else, or have been co-written by both authors in large teams of the
Editors’ Collective. In contrast, the third section entitled ‘Digital teaching, digital
learning and digital science’ presents an ongoing series of one-to one dialogues
between Michael Adrian Peters and Petar Jandrić. In the first dialogue we explore
philosophy of education in the age of digital reason, and in the second dialogue
we inquire various relationships between learning, creative col(labor)ation, and
knowledge cultures. We move on to look into the evolution of digital reading,
and then inquire the nature of digital self and digital being. We explore radical
openness, creative labour, and the co-production of symbolic goods, and start
building our own vision of the digital university. We explore various manifestos,
declarations and letters which reflect human life, research, and learning in our
(post)digital age. In place of conclusion, we summarize analyses and conclusions
from this book in the Digital University Manifesto.
The Digital University
We live in the epoch of digital reason, which has significantly altered the traditional
order of things. In our epoch, yesterday’s institutions will either become slaves to
corporate capitalism, or they will significantly transform in order to maintain an
active role in co-creation of the present and future. Political, social, and economic
pressures strongly favour the first option—however, we firmly believe that our
society needs to opt for the latter. It is only with free knowledge creation, and free
education, that our society and its members can be truly free.
Having said that, social development is tricky business which consists of trial
and error. The traditional university will probably perish and evolve, lose and gain,
play positive and negative roles in human learning and knowledge development—
and all of that at the same time. We embrace multiplicity of understandings of
the contemporary university, and strongly reject simplistic polarisations between
us and them, the good guys and the bad guys, the digital and the non-digital,
the human and the post-human. Therefore, our work can be well described by
John Holloway’s phrase in, against, and beyond (Holloway, 2016). We understand
6 | The Digital University: A Dialogue and Manifesto
that our work is deeply imbued in the current system of knowledge production
and education. Our research points towards various systemic problems with this
system, and we strongly struggle against these problems. Instead of succumbing
to the frightening and often non-productive binary characteristic for the position
in and against, we strive beyond the current university and towards our vision of
the digital university. Our book consists of academic inquiry, solutions develop-
ment, social and philosophical visions, and the ethos of radical openness—and
we believe that all these components are essential for developing a viable path
towards the future.
We embrace this position not just theoretically, but also practically. In this
book, therefore, we offer a mix of chapters written in various standard and
non-standard academic genres. Some chapters are (presented as) typical academic
papers; others are written as dialogues. Some chapters are written individually;
some chapters are co-written by the two of us; ‘Towards a philosophy of academic
publishing’ is co-written by 26 people. Some chapters are philosophical; others
are oriented to very practical matters. In place of a traditional conclusion, we
summarize the book with the one-page Digital University Manifesto.
This book is an experiment, a reflection of the epoch of digital reason, and
a statement of our political and personal positions. Social development is a slow
collective process, and our vision is just one of many. However, we feel that it is
important to experiment, to challenge, and to explore. It would thrill us to see
this book succeed, but we will not be too sorry if it fails to meet the established
social and academic expectations—as scientists, we must supress own vanity and
understand that negative results are just as valuable as positive results. On that
basis, we can merely hope that The Digital University: A Dialogue and Manifesto
will serve as a small building block in the large collective consideration about the
future of the digital university.
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Hendler, J., & Berners-Lee, T. (2010). From the semantic Web to social machines: A research chal-
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