"Recombinant" Education

I found the Week 4 materials (and activity) particularly interesting and thought-provoking. Predicting the future, as we all know, is often a fool's errand or a mug's game. All we have to do is look at the history of "futurism". Various World Fairs have boldly predicted "the world of tomorrow". Disney had Tomorrowland--which evolved into "New Tomorrowland", a retrospective look at futurism. We rarely get it right when we try to predict the future of anything--but we can't resist trying. It's the nature of our species.

There is plenty to unpack simply in the title of the Knowledge Works 3.0 document, "Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Learning Ecosystem" (KnowledgeWorks, 2012). First of all, the document uses the software version convention (3.0). This suggests that it is the third "major release" of the document, which in turn suggests that the document is an iterative process, rather than a finished product. The software version convention suggests that minor "tweaks" and "bug fixes" receive a designation following the point (2.1, 2.2, etc). Only major overhauls receive a new designation before the point. One must, therefore, assume that version 3.0 is a major overhaul from version 2.x.

The use of the term "recombinant" suggests a deliberate borrowing from the world of genetics. Recombinant DNA (rDNA) is artificially created DNA. It is manufactured in a lab. The term recombinant also suggests or implies genetic modification. Therefore, one must conclude that the report is an artificial creation, perhaps intended to modify the "genetic code" of education.

Sadly, I found the document rather wanting. To me, it suffered from the same afflictions that plague all forms of futurism. They are invariably either deeply utopian or profoundly utopian. This document is clearly the latter. so much of what it blithely proposes as "good" or "beneficial" struck me as profoundly chilling. I also found that it suffered from massive amounts of pseudo-science and "technobabble"--meaningless jargon.

The notion of "democratized startup" and "edupreneurship" (KnowledgeWorks 2012) may sound wonderful on the surface, but there is absolutely no evidence to support the claim. The very notion of "democracy" is actually laughable. The kinds of resources--beginning with simple access to the requisite technological tools--are available only to (upper) middle class learners. There is already a huge "digital divide" which threatens to become only worse. The social/class issues and problems with the report are astonishing.

The idea that "we" will all become independent contractors is also chilling. This is already happening, and causing huge social disruption. Independent contractors have no job security. They typically have no benefits (health care, pension, and so on). This, of course, is tremendously attractive to global capitalism, but comes at equally tremendous human cost. Yet the report completely ignores the social implications in its glowing praise of such a future.

But what I found most disturbing is not only blithe acceptance but outright cheerleading for incredibly invasive data analytics, cognitive prosthetics, automated alerts, invasive neuroscience, and so on. This is flat-out terrifying. The idea of reducing huamn beings to nothing more than data points or streams to be constantly monitored and "optimized" is straight of the most nightmarish science fiction imaginable. The privacy implications alone should be enough to induce sheer terror. Yet the document sees nothing but deliriously positive outcomes from these things.

If this is indeed the future of education, educators, and learners, I personally want no part of any such future!

Reference: KnowledgeWorks (2011). Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Learning Ecosystem. Retrieved from:http://knowledgeworks.org/future-of-learning