Ethics of Coding: A Report on the Algorithmic Condition
Project 732407 funded under H2020-EU.2.1.1. – INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP – Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies – Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/207025_en.html
October 13-14 2017
EoC Invited Seminar “Educational Coding” at Maynooth University, Ireland
Lunches, teas and coffees and snacks offered to participants. (Please notify dietary preferences.)
October 13 2017 3:00pm – 6:30pm
October 14 2017 9:15am – 5:30pm
Phoenix Boardroom, Maynooth University.
This seminar is designed to maximise discussion and to afford interrogation of key concepts and questions. Each participant will bring a question and the speakers will also offer questions. We have scheduled lots of coffee time to enable conversations. All participants are asked to read the texts circulated in advance of the session as these provide a context for the speakers’ contributions and for the different disciplinary angles. Please contact aislinn.odonnell@mu.ie for these and please note where speakers have asked that texts not be distributed further. Both speakers and participants offer a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and positions so please be cognisant of this in discussion and be ready to explain further your questions or comments. The aim is to share knowledge and ideas and also to offer a critical framework to interrogate our own concepts and positions.
A series of key questions have anchored this programme, however both speakers and participants will bring additional questions.
- How can we come to understand education in the context of the ‘algorithmic condition’?
- Are different concepts of the school and educational institutions required?
- What is educational coding, i.e. what are the codes that govern educational institutions, educational spaces and institutions with educational practices?
- What are the ethical implications, challenges and opportunities of the contemporary evolution of technology?
- How does the human-technology interface need to be re-figured, and how ought this be approached both pedagogically and educationally?
- What models for education can be developed that will support critical reflection and interrogation in the DSM?
- How will new forms of communication enable the re-figuration of ethical and political codes in Europe and beyond?
“Educational Coding”
Programme
Friday October 13th 2017
3:00-3:30 pm Coffees and teas and light snacks.
3:30-3:45pm Introductions: Professor Felicity Colman and Professor Aislinn
O’Donnell.
3:45-5:00pm Professor Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling)
Title: “Educating Extended Minds”
Question: ‘Are we already cyborgs, and, if so, should we be educated as such?’
5:00-5:30pm Dr Jessica Foley (Connect/Trinity College Dublin) Proposition,
5:30-6:30pm Dr Aphra Kerr (Maynooth University)
Title: “Towards an Ethics of Inclusion of Socio-Technical Codes”
October 14th 2017
9:15-9:45 am Coffee and Pastries
9:45-10:00am Dr Noel Fitzpatrick (DIT/GradCAM), Proposition.
10:00-11.15am Dr Ben Williamson (University of Stirling)
Title: “Brain data: scanning, scraping and sculpting the learning
brain through neurotechnology in education”
11.15am-11:45am Coffee Break
11:45am-1:00pm Professor Rob Kitchin (Maynooth University)
Title and Question: “What are the ethical implications and challenges of the contemporary evolution of technology?”
1:00pm-2:00pm Lunch: Hot lunch provided so please ensure you forward your dietary preferences in advance.
2:00pm-3.15pm Dr Nancy Vansieleghem (LUCA School of Art, Belgium)
Title: “Scholastic practices in digital education: on digital grammatisation and poetisation”
Question: ‘How to think and design digital education in which the algorithmic condition itself becomes visible or present?’
3:15pm-5:00pm Professor Jan Masschelein
Title: “A scholastic checklist for digital(ized) learning environments”
Question: ‘To what extent can we say indeed that steering through algorithms is about ‘counting’ and to what extent can we say that they can fail but not ‘err’?’
5:00-5:30pm Questioning Workshop and Next Steps.
Abstracts
Professor Michael Wheeler
Title: “Educating extended minds”
Abstract: It is of our very nature as evolved and embodied cognitive creature to create tools which support and enhance our raw organic intelligence by dovetailing with our brains and bodies to form shifting human artefact coalitions operating over various time-scales. This is no less true of our engagement with the abacus, the book or the slide-rule than it is of our engagement with the laptop, the tablet or the smartphone.
Nevertheless, our contemporary human-technological interfaces pose a suite of distinctive opportunities and challenges, not least in and around the classroom. In this talk, I’ll examine the intersection between technology and education from the perspective of the extended mind hypothesis, a view that has been developed and defended in recent (philosophy of) cognitive science. According to this hypothesis, the physical machinery of mind sometimes extends beyond the skull and skin, in such a way that certain items of technology are rightly accorded fundamentally the same status as would ordinarily be accorded to a subset of your neurons. Sometimes your smartphone really is part of your memory, in the sense that it’s part of your mnemonic machinery, while your brain is just one element – albeit the core, persisting element – in sequences of dynamically constructed and temporarily instantiated extended cognitive systems. As I shall argue, the extended mind perspective has the potential to change how we think about ethically charged phenomena such as knowledge, ownership, responsibility, attainment and agency, in an educational context.
Dr Aphra Kerr (Maynooth University)
Title: “Towards an ethics of inclusion of socio-technical codes”
Abstract: The latest figures from the International Telecommunications Union point to a deteriorating gender gap in access to and use of the internet, especially in developing countries (ITU 2017). Further, despite decades of investment in the promotion of coding and STEM subjects in the developed world, the numbers of women entering the computing workforce have remained stubbornly low, and a high number of those leaving mid-career. These digital inequalities are linked in complex ways to social inequality and disadvantage. It is however clear that there is a persistent gendering of computer technology, of programming and of code and that women in particular are being disadvantaged.
One sub-sector of computing that consistently ranks lowest in terms of gender diversity in employment and user involvement is digital games. Yet gamification and digital games are often seen as trojan horses to introduce people to the joy of coding. They are presented as ways to broaden inclusion and diversity. In this talk I would like to problematise this approach and explore the social distinctions and biases operating within and around code in digital games.
Drawing upon the sociology of technology, techno-feminism and over a decade of research on digital games I argue that an ethics of inclusion needs to consider the ways in which digital games produce socio-technical distinctions, especially in relation to gender (Kerr 2017, Kerr and Kelleher 2015). The technical and the social are ‘mutually shaping’ and educators need to consider the possible prior negative experience that learners possess of digital cultures, the gender bias of many technology development teams and how social biases may become enacted by the technology of code. Algorithmic cultures may reinforce, rather than recode, social discrimination and bias which may be then further reinforced with input from user data.
Understanding how this social discrimination and power operates in the design and use of algorithmic environments will be a crucial first step for any ethics of inclusion in the design and use of code. Considering how and where we educate for inclusion will be another. Finally, drawing upon ongoing work in the international Refiguring Innovation in Digital Games project I will discuss some possible inclusion strategies that seek to challenge who can make a digital game, and indeed how we can re-code them (Shaw 2012, Jenson and de Castell 2015, Sorensen, Faulkner, and Rommes 2011).
ITU. 2017. “Women in ICTs and Connectivity “, accessed 31/07/2017. http://www.itu.int/en/action/genderequality/
data/Pages/ie.aspx?/en/action/gender-equality/data/Pages/default.aspx.
Jenson, Jennifer, and Suzanne de Castell. 2015. Online Games, Gender and Feminism. In The International
Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, edited by Robin Mansell, Peng Hwa Ang, Aphra Kerr, Pieter
Ballon, Sandra Braman, David J. Grimshaw, James D. Ivory, Dorothea Kleine, Charles Steinfield and Shenja van
der Graaf. Malden and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell-ICA Encyclopedias of Communication.
Kerr, Aphra. 2017. Global Games. Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Era. New York:
Routledge.
Kerr, Aphra, and John Kelleher. 2015. “The Recruitment of Passion and Community in the Service of Capital.
Community Managers in the Digital Games Industry.” Critical Studies in Media Communication. doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2015.1045005.
Shaw, Adrienne. 2012. “Do you identify as a gamer? Gender, race, sexuality, and gamer identity.” New Media
& Society 14 (1):28-44. doi: 10.1177/1461444811410394.
Sorensen, Knut, Wendy Faulkner, and Els Rommes. 2011. Technologies of Inclusion. Gender in the Information
Society. Trondheim, Norway: Tapir Academic Press.
Dr Ben Williamson (University of Stirling, UK)
Title: “Brain data: scanning, scraping and sculpting the learning brain through
neurotechnology in education”
Abstract: Neurotechnology is an advancing field of research and development combining neuroscience insights into the human brain with advanced technical development in brain imaging, ‘bio-mimetic’ computing, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and even neuroenhancement applications. As these developments are being extended to education, they present potential for businesses and governments to enact new techniques of ‘neurogovernance’ by ‘scanning’ the brain, ‘scraping’ it for data, and then ‘sculpting’ the brain toward particular cognitive and affective capacities. The aim of this paper is to critically examine the purposes to which neurotechnology is being put in education, interrogating the commercial and governmental objectives associated with it, the neuroscientific concepts and expertise that underpin it, and the imaginaries of the future of education its promoters project. The paper builds on a combination of studies of software and code as ‘sociotechnical’ products and ‘biosocial’ studies of biological and social interpenetration, in order to approach
neurotechnologies as consisting of neurobiological codes (how the brain is known to neuroscience), software codes (how technologies have been designed to capture brain data), and social codes of conduct (how the brain is targeted for improvement by various authorities). The paper will identify some of the intersecting biosocio- technical codes in emerging neurotechnology proposals in education.
Professor Rob Kitchin (Maynooth University)
Title: What are the ethical implications and challenges of the contemporary
evolution of technology?
Abstract: In this paper I will set out the ethical challenges that ubiquitous computing raises paying particular attention to privacy and the use of data generated, drawing on research relating to smart cities and reapplying with respect to education. In turn, I will discuss solutionism, technocratic approach and corporatisation of service delivery, increasing datafication, individual and group privacy harms, predictive privacy harms, obfuscation and reduced control, sharing and repurposing of data, and existing and possible approaches to addressing ethical concerns.
Dr Nancy Vansieleghem (LUCA, School of Arts, Belgium)
Title: “Scholastic practices in digital education: on digital grammatisation and
poetisation”
Abstract: The integration and expansion of digital technology changes education fundamentally. At several places it is argued that digital technology makes new forms of open, collaborative and self-paced education possible. At the same time critical voices claim that we are facing the end of education as we know it in favor of online learning environments. Without being for or against digital technologies in education, I argue that education is increasingly mediated and augmented by computer coded technology. Digital devices not only trace the subject, they also produce the subject. They play a formative role in the kind of thinking and acting that takes place and might as much form and deform their users. In this regard and based on Masschelein and Simons, I defend the view that there is an essential difference between scholastic practices and learning practices, and argue for the penetration of scholastic practices in digital education. In trying to understand what this could mean in practice, I refer to a concrete online course for the arts (bMOOC). I believe that bMOOC allows for redefining digital education in terms of a particular space that enacts practices of digital grammatisation, discipline and poetisation.
Professor Jan Masschelein (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Title: A scholastic checklist for digital(ized) learning environments
Abstract: Starting from an elaboration of the strong emancipatory agencing of the school as pedagogic form it will be clarified how today educational institutions with the help of digital technologies based on algorithms are transformed into learning environments which actually tame or neutralize school as pedagogic form and it’s emancipatory potential. There is a way of taming and neutralizing the school as pedagogic form which has been analysed in many different, detailed and meanwhile familiar ways and which we could call the totally institutionalised ‘modern’ school. That is the school as an institution which is organized in view of a predefined (political, social, personal, religious) ideal. A school that is aiming at a normalised individual through the presence of a teacher embodying the norm and through disciplining practices of the mind and the body which, as some have stated, prepares (workers) for the industrial factory and (citizens/inhabitants) for the modern, bureaucratic state. Today, besides (or maybe in line with) the way identity politics threatens the school, the most important attempt to tame the school is the attempt to turn the school into a ‘personalized learning environment’ that offers resources for learning seen as an investment and as effective and efficient production of learning outcomes. Learning being everywhere and all the time. These ‘environments’ (no longer ‘institutions’) are conceived as ‘learner-centred’ and designed to take into account the ‘uniqueness’ of the learner and the individual learning needs. They offer ideally personalised learning trajectories that include permanent monitoring, incentives, personalized feedback and profiling in order to realize employability (not normalization) in terms of competences and to capitalize the human (creative) learning potential. They require no teachers that embody norms but disembodied coaches and designers of the learning environment. One could maybe state that these learning environments (and think about the new fab-labs, creative labs, edulabs) are no longer preparing someone for the ‘modern’ factory or ‘modern’ state, but that they are a full part of the new factories (now becoming creative and immaterial, exploiting the learning force everywhere and all the time, learning factories indeed) and the new ‘viapolitics’ (governing trajectories through personal recognition). It will be argued that these learning environments entail a systematic dismantling of the basic operations (including a refusal of the basic assumptions) of school as pedagogic form and hence constitute also an unprecedented threat to its emancipatory potential. From an emancipatory pedagogical perspective, one should plea for the re-invention of school in digital conditions. In order to be able to do that some pedagogical touchstones will be presented that could allow at once to ‘test’ the scholastic character of technologies and especially of practices but also to think about designing new ones.
Ethics of Coding 