Jenna Ruddock and Joan Donovan’s (2023) recent essay “Towards a public interest internet” is a great prompt for us to think critically about – and to think critically beyond – the current corporate capture of digital technology use in education. Ruddock and Donovan highlight two sides of the same argument – (i) why we need to oppose private forms of EdTech, and (ii) how we might realign and reimagine EdTech along radically different lines.

i) Standing firm against private forms of EdTech

Ruddock and Donovan first remind us why corporate IT interests are an intrinsically harmful presence in public education. Most obviously, this relates to a clear clash of priorities and motivations – with any IT industry actions ultimately underpinned by a concern with profit. Indeed, Ruddock and Donovan remind us that even the most progressive corporate entities “must prioritise the interests of investors, shareholders, and paying customers, which may or may not align with any vision of ‘a better internet’ for the rest of us” (p.119).

Of course, profit-led agendas do not stop IT industry actors from espousing commitments to developing ‘tech for good’ or striving towards ‘better’ forms of EdTech. Yet beneath these headline ambitions, vague notions of ‘good’ and ‘better’ will almost always fail to disclose the beneficiaries of these benefits. For example, it is currently fashionable to promote the need for more ‘human-centred’ forms of AI, without any clarity around which humans are being talked about. As such, Ruddock and Donovan encourage us to ask the key question of ‘Better for who?’. As they put it – “[Better] for the public? For the company’s shareholders? For paying customers? For advertisers? Where do those visions overlap— and, more tellingly, where do they diverge?” (p.118).

Such concerns should alert us to the ways that IT industry interests – and capitalist society in general – work to distract from these crucial specificities and nuances. Above all, IT industry interests work hard to present their products and actions as essentially above politics – as purely technical matters of scientific innovation. As Ruddock and Donovan (2023) put it, these companies make great efforts to ‘disavow the politics’ of what they are doing “and the power they consequently exert, while preaching the gospel of neutrality” (p.117).

One recurring example of this is the IT industry obsession with presenting its products and services as somehow ‘virtual’, weightless and other-worldly – ‘in-the-cloud’ and simultaneously ‘everywhere and nowhere’. Yet, as Ruddock and Donovan (2023, p.118) reason, this ephemeral framing of digital technology as ‘virtual’ is “itself a political act—it obscures everything from the physical presence of internet infrastructure in our communities and the labour necessary to operate and maintain it, to decisions about costs and extractive demands on vital resources”.

Elsewhere, when IT industry actors are prepared to talk about the politics of digital technology, this is usually framed in ways that seek to discourage regulation and government ‘overreach’. This is evident in recent self-serving strawman arguments from the likes of OpenAI against the suppression of innovation and fears of misguided regulation. In extreme cases, tech corporations might be pushed merely to the point of mealy-mouthed concessions to ‘ethics’, ‘safety’, ‘audits’ and self-regulation – all of which tend to lack genuine social concern and compassion, and be defined in terms which can be easily addressed, ‘solved’ and eventually kicked into the grass.

ii) Reimagining EdTech along radically different lines

Looking forward, Ruddock and Donavon also point to how our uses of digital technology in education might be reimagined and constituted along radically different lines. Here Ruddock and Donavon remind us that we already have a wealth of knowledge and experience to draw on in terms of what public interest digital technology looks like – not least the wisdom arising from decades of community technology, open-source and free-software movements: 

“We already have the tools to conceptualise [digital technology] that serves the broadest public good. The [digital] needs to be grounded in an overt set of politics that places people over profit and aims for equitable distribution of services and products, where inequality and sustainability are taken as seriously as technological bugs” (p.120)

Rethinking what EdTech might look like as a social movement (rather than corporate concern) therefore foregrounds the need to think of ways of reorienting and reorganising digital technology through local and regional collectives, as well as global networked movements. It also foregrounds the need to pursue explicitly political approaches to EdTech resourcing and infrastructure – for example, encouraging decentralised forms of community ownership and community maintenance that is subject to collective oversight.

Finally, rethinking what EdTech might look like as a social movement also foregrounds the need to develop a collective willingness to confront the politics of EdTech – to make visible all the problematic aspects of corporate EdTech (as just outlined earlier), to encourage and enable public scrutiny of current dependence on private, for-profit forms of EdTech, and to stimulate public debate around what future forms of EdTech might look like if genuinely grounded in the public’s interest.

In short, Ruddock and Donovan give us hope that other forms of EdTech are possible. More importantly, they remind us that the means to achieve this are readily available if we look beyond the hegemony of the IT industry version of digital technology that currently dominates. Towards a public interest EdTech!

Reference

Ruddock, J. and Donovan, J. (2023). Towards a public interest internet. In Cath, C. (ed). Eaten by the internet. Meatspace Press (pp.177-122)