capitalism

Recently, Turnitin was purchased for $1.75 billion dollars. Turnitin is the malicious corporation that neoliberal universities use to de-skill faculty labor. Ostensibly, it's to "reduce cheating", but -- as many have pointed out -- they do so in a simple-minded way that steals student work (everything students submit in the so-called "learning management systems" gets piratically stolen by the corporation and used to support their business model) and undermines the relationship between students and faculty. I use three strategies to reduce the incentives and potential for student cheating without Turnitin.

My primary goal is to have each student or group do novel projects. If work is actually novel, there are no easy candidates to cheat from. If each student (or group) is working on something unique, they can collaborate and share resources without the potential for competition or cheating to come into play. If you have students all working on identical papers (or solving "classic" problems) there is always a tempting array of examples of the "work" already done (and probably done better than any student could do it).

Second, I have students do their work in an environment where I can see the the development of the project over time. I used to use a Wiki or Drupal Revisions for this. Currently, I'm using Google Docs. This way, I can see snapshots of the project from inception to outline to finished document. I can provide feedback along the way and, in the end, have great confidence that the finished product was the authentic work of the student(s) -- much more so than if the document sprang into existence the night before it was due.

Finally, I aim to have students work on projects that are genuinely engaging. If students do authentic work that they see as valuable, there's no incentive to cheat: students will do the work because it's real work that has intrinsic merit to them.

The only reason for something like "Turnitin" is that we've created an environment where faculty have too many students to get to know them all personally. Neoliberal universities are constantly reducing the number of faculty, increasing their workload, and substituting robot labor like "Turnitin" to allowing faculty to know their students well enough to offer meaningful work and guide their writing personally. Faculty should resist the speed-up and opt-out of having their students' submissions be stolen by the parasitic corporations that aim to create a hostile environment for everyone.

Donald Trump continues to announce his extreme right-wing picks for his cabinet. Each one seems worse than the next. I am particularly disturbed by the choices of Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon.

Both Flynn and Bannon believe that the United States is, or ought to be, a Christian state. They believe "we" are fighting a war against Islam, which they say is an "idealogy" rather than a religion. They seemingly get that first amendment protects "religion", but evidently take this to mean that by labeling a religion as an "ideology", it should not receive protection. But if they believe in the first amendment, they will also recognize that "we" are not Christian. Steve Bannon says:

when capitalism was I believe at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West. They were either active participants in the Jewish faith, they were active participants in the Christians’ faith, and they took their beliefs, and the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did. And I think that’s incredibly important and something that would really become unmoored. I can see this on Wall Street today — I can see this with the securitization of everything

Note: It says "securitization", but based on comments elsewhere in his speech, I believe he means "secularization", e.g. "The other tendency is an immense secularization of the West. And I know we’ve talked about secularization for a long time, but if you look at younger people, especially millennials under 30, the overwhelming drive of popular culture is to absolutely secularize this rising iteration" and "I certainly think secularism has sapped the strength of the Judeo-Christian West to defend its ideals".

Bannon is putting his finger on a problem: that capitalism has become unmoored from any other measure of morality. But to make the assumption that the only kind of morality worthy of consideration is a Christian morality leads us down a very dark path indeed.

When I heard about ContactCon, I signed up almost immediately. The issues being raised have been of interest to me since I started using the Internet: how to make sure the net can be used for empowerment rather than oppression. The net is clearly useful for both, but the trend has been shifting in the wrong direction for years.

A corporation would have never made something like the Internet in the first place. When I was a kid, we still had The old AT&T and Bell Telephone network. You weren't allowed to own a telephone: you were required to rent one from the phone company. And everything was monetized. Now, I suspect that the most expensive thing about current cell-phone operations is the overhead necessary for administration, metering, and billing. And that's the direction we've been going: give users a dumbed-down box that only enables what the monetizers want you to be able to do.

There were a lot of interesting people at ContactCon most of whom I'd never met before. The demographic was mostly white, largely male, and somewhat younger than me. There were some folks my age or older, but we were the exception. Many were young entrepreneurs and freelancers looking to network to support their project. It reminded me of the luxury of my current circumstances: I have a steady job and don't need to spend half my time trying to market myself or bill people. I don't have to work on spec or limit what I do to what people are willing to pay for. I get to spend most of my time actually just working and being creative. I lament for this generation that is so circumscribed and limited in their choices -- and will probably end up permanently stunted by the economic conditions that have been imposed on us by the 1%. Or, if you prefer, that through my generation's lack of engagement, we have allowed ourselves to be disempowered.

I wore my "Official Red Hat" red hat and took my ubuntu netbook to demonstrate my free software street cred. I actually met the guy who'd ordered the stock of red hats when he worked at Red Hat in that time period. I had completely borked my install of Ubuntu a few days ago (or maybe the update from Easy Peasy never really worked right). In the event, I completely wiped the netbook the night before and re-installed everything. I've started using Dropbox to maintain the rough drafts of my writing, so it was easy to get my data back. I could have just taken my macbook, but it wouldn't have been as fun. In point of fact, I hardly used it, but it was nice to know it was there.

I met dozens of people, learned about many new projects, and also touched base with projects I've known about but haven't had time to explore. I've been interested in the Freedom Box since I first heard about it: it's consistent with my vision for people having their own server. And it's also the only way to have any assurance of privacy: you can't trust third parties not to reveal all of your private information to the government or corporations.

I organized a discussion about education and unschooling. It was a very receptive audience to the ideas and there were a number of people working on interesting things. The most interesting was probably Be You, but there were many, many others. ContactCon reminded me of what John Jungck used to say about the goals of BioQUEST: to begin conversations worth continuing. I suspect I will continue to interact with some of these people going forward.