The Pedagogy of Emancipatory Technology
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Transcript of The Pedagogy of Emancipatory Technology
The Pedagogy of Emancipatory Technology
Social Tech ConferenceToronto, ON 22 Oct 2010
Free Software and Emancipation
Four FreedomsRun
Modify
Copy
Redistribute
** What FS offers us*The four freedoms of FS -- to run, change, copy, and redistribute -- are a powerful "social technology" that guarantee important rights to the users of software -- *that's in a legal sense. *In a social sense, they create conditions that encourage certain forms of sociality -- the LUG, the software dev list, the patch system, etc. *Free Software, then, /guarantees/ the 4 freedoms, but/encourages/ social transformations as well.
What's Missing?
Great for Hackers
**** for people who already want to hack, FS is fantastic.
What's Missing?
Great for Hackers
Irrelevant to the rest of us
But for those w/out hacking skills/inclination, it isn't nearly so great.**** FS works great /if you're already living with a certian relaiton to software technologies// -- **** what I call an 'emancipated' relationship.
So to make FS meaningful, we need to cultivate an /emancipated/ relation to technology
Emancipatory Technology
We need to change the way we relate to technology
So alongside the formal freedoms of Free Software, cultivate substantive freedoms
Can't create these relations with contracts!
More than Freedom: Emancipation
*** The whole point of change the way we relate to technologyTechnologies enable us in many ways: - extend our capacities to move, sense, think.but can limit us as ell:- when yr car breaks down & you can't think how to get around- new relation that fixes this... *** so ET doesn't reference a property of the technology itself, but a mode of relating to the technology, which allows it to open up new possibilities & expand your horizons
Autonomy
The law we give to ourselves
How do we create autonomous agents?
The Bildung tradition
*** Kantian sense of autonomy, self-governance, giving of the rule to oneself
- why do we care about freedom?
- free rational agents who are the source of the authority behind the very moral laws that bind us
- when you give yourself the law, your ethical status changes, as do your possibioities for action. we become free by being agents of the rules that govern us
Pedagogy / Bildung
Education as Cultivation
Education as Transformation
Education as Liberation
The role of Technologies
the formation of the self is the proper aim of education (cf. fr. /formation/). What does it take to put people in charge of their own technological possibilities.
Some Emancipatory Technologies
The Bicycle
Intrinsically emancipatory?
Freedom of Movement
Sociality
But it can break
Bikes Not Bombs
Bikes Not Bombs
Bike skills give to give kids freedom
Mission of Social Transformation
Bike Pirates
Autonomously organized collective
Self-motivated learning
Computer Hardware & Software
As important as the bicycle?
And more mystifying to boot
Genderchangers
Amsterdam-based Women's Self-Education Project
Explicit focus on self-transformation
Upcycle
Schools
Upcycle
Schools
Upcycle
Schools
Upcycle
SchoolsSocial Housing
Upcycle
SchoolsSocial HousingUndergraduates
Upcycle
SchoolsSocial HousingUndergraduatesNext Steps?
Social Change
It's not about legal structures
It's not about access
It's about practices
What kind of infrastructure of practice can we build in Toronto?
b/c what matters most is this /relation/, it's never sufficient to simply give someone a piece of technology.
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