Can our global community really thrive in -- and when it comes right down to it, do we really want to live in -- a world where love and care have been delegitimized and dominated by other forces? This question is reflective of a struggle alive and well in many educational settings today which can minimize and relegate love and care to the domain of personal relationships. The diminished presence of love and care in education contributes to its invalidation as a credible consideration in political, economic, scientific, and business systems and decision making. For education to support the creation of a more just, equitable, and sustainable future for all, love and care must play a vital and credible role in educating at all stages of life in formal and informal settings. In this presentation, I will share my experiences as a practitioner in academic, technical, and business settings fostering individual and collective learning through nurturing the commons. These experiences will be contextualized through a framework for love and care which articulates theory to support transformative participatory learning experiences sourced from the commons. I will also share project examples and specific methods as well as discuss challenges.
Across decades of investment in tools such as LMSs, MOOCs, Covid-era online learning, and now generative AI, the United States edtech ecosystem has built infrastructure for tracking and assessing students, teachers, and schools. This investment has not met its promise of providing educators and students with the knowledge to support learning throughout students’ academic lives. Through a series of focus groups with K12 teachers, administrators, and edtech providers [1], the dynamics of the failure of a mutually beneficial use of knowledge commons and potential alternative futures were previously explored and findings will be described.
The US edtech ecosystems’ stakeholders, including private high-tech and edtech companies, local, state, and national government, school systems and their employees, and families, have misaligned motivators, power differentials, and a lack of incentives to align better. Edtech tools are commonly designed to surveil both teachers and students who have limited access to knowledge derived from walled gardens of corporate and sometimes governmental data. The US has limited privacy and security regulation while corporate governance is driven more by market forces than lifelong learning goals. The private walled gardens are designed to sell products such as software, devices, and data itself, rather than benefit students directly. Meanwhile, commercial research incentivizes product-driven evaluation over deeper learning questions and limits external researchers’ contributions. Edtech tools’ cognitivist approach to measuring student progress may provide insights into short-term improvements, rarer insights across a given school year, and limited to no information across years. The cognitivist orientation has limited or no data on student motivation and interests or the classroom environment, and limited capacity to support creative or less structured lessons. Based on previous focus group findings, several alternative approaches will be described including codesign with school experts as necessary approaches to sustainable design of digital infrastructure, shared access (and not necessarily ownership) to data across walled gardens, and changes to regulation that both incentivize and require change.
1. Sylvan, E. et al. (2023). Empowering Students in a Datafied World: Adult Stakeholders’ Perspectives on Digital Self-Determination in the U.S. K12 Environment. In the International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (ISLS). Montreal, Canada.
This paper explores the landscape of the Knowledge Commons research in Latin America, focusing on how Latin American scholars interpret and apply theoretical frameworks for analyzing Knowledge Commons. To begin, we provide a brief history of commons research in the region, highlighting the influence of Elinor Ostrom's work. Following this historical overview, we conduct a literature review of the current state of academic production related to Knowledge Commons in Latin America. Our review identifies several key barriers that hinder the study of Knowledge Commons in the region, including language barriers, the lack of specialized courses and research groups, and insufficient centers dedicated to commons scholarship. We also emphasize the need for transnational and transdisciplinary working groups to promote collaboration across borders. Finally, this paper aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the Knowledge Commons within the context of Latin American scholarship, demonstrating how scholars in the region can offer valuable empirical studies, explore new themes, and provide fresh insights to the field.
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