Online education in the nineties and the early years of Web 2.0 was a largely optimistic period that understood the internet as a public square, not even necessarily a market. Its basic protocols—HTTP, HTML, email, and the domain-name system—did not belong to a single company, and publishing did not ordinarily require entry into one proprietary platform

In retrospect, by 2010 the web was already organizing around algorithmic feeds, user identities, app stores, and private platforms. The educational technology industry shifted as well. Learning management systems became cloud services. They developed their own mobile apps. MOOCs began to appear. Google developed its own suite of education applications. Google offered their email and productivity apps to universities that integrated them into their systems.

University IT departments become platform adoption offices. The university invests in Zoom, Panopto, Microsoft 36t, Box, etc. (to name some on my campus), and then IT must promote, encourage and support use on campus. The same is the case with the LMS. I wrote about this and iTunes University in 2007. Here’s the abstract:

The development of mobile, convergent media networks is altering the context of professional, educational, and everyday communication. This essay examines the incorporation of iTunes University into writing and new media composition instruction, including institutional and technological contexts and faculty and student responses. This examination suggests the value of studying networked composition by following the expanding web of local interactions that link the conventional scene of composition—the student at the computer—with other events, such as college policy decisions, technology design choices, and the multitude of other compositional events behind the media available to students across the Internet. As these mobile networks become more powerful and pervasive, they will have a greater impact on compositional practices and will require a shift in habitual, disciplinary approaches to authorship and to the relationship between the more formal discourses of academics and the informal communications on mobile networks.

Much of this is obvious now, but some just didn’t turn out that way. I was still describing a world in which institutions and individuals would compose through networks. I had not yet fully imagined a world in which a handful of platforms would organize the conditions of composition itself. In 2007 it was still possible to imagine a world where the internet expanded the possibility for composition and communication.

Today, it’s not just AI (or its bubble), though obviously that’s the elephant in the room. The gathering and extraction of human expression and its repurposing as algorithmic platforms that interact with us for various commercial purposes is the hallmark of the current market. It is the business model of many of the biggest market capitalization corporations: ( Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta) as well as frontier AI, and by extension all the infrastructure downstream from their dollars.

My point is that the “online classroom” has changed.

The LMS and other university efforts to create a disciplined online learning environment are an understandable response to these conditions. Universities pay ed tech companies for “contractual restraint” in their use of student data (as opposed to a rapacious commercial market). Then we must rely on those corporations to protect our data from breaches (or not).

Here’s another way to think of it. The generic pedagogical tools of any LMS (discussions, quizzes, etc.) are generally “free to use” elsewhere on the web. The feature set, while necessary in an LMS, is not where the commercial value lies. The value-added of the LMS is that it provides a digital enclosure that demonstrates a university’s due diligence in privacy protection, and expands the university’s management of learning. The LMS can integrate with university student data and this now provides an increasingly rich field of data for both the university and, within set contractual limits, its corporate vendors.

In short, the enclosure does not prevent data extraction so much as convert it into institutionally authorized and contractually regulated datafication. And if such claims seem beyond how universities would act, consider how this potential is celebrated by EDUCAUSE: “The convergence of learning analytics, AI advising systems, early alert platforms, and wellness monitoring has created something genuinely new: the technical capacity to understand a student not as a transcript but as a person. “

A technical understanding of a student as a “person.”

These grandiose (if dehumanizing) assertions aside, Ed Tech doesn’t regulate the global internet, and so when broader infrastructural shifts occur, then the promises of these technologies fail. When I wrote that article about iTunes University it was during a brief period when the idea of students blogging on the public web had potential. I once taught a course in Second Life and that is/was a public VR space. Those were all treated as experimental environments in my classes. I taught then and as I do now how to investigate and analyze these spaces. So in those days, actually being in the spaces made sense. Those days are long gone in my view.

Instead, as I am teaching in-person in the fall, I’m wondering why I would need an online component at all. I might use the university LMS because all the other classes are there, and so the students are there. It can be a place for picking up readings and dropping off assignments. It’s an easy way to send a mass email. The LMS as a mailroom could be ok, but when students upload their work, it becomes data stored and processed on D2L’s infrastructure under the terms of the university’s contract. 

The running joke in AI Forward university talk–or at least I think it’s a joke– is that generative AI has exposed all the inefficiencies and backwardness of higher education and now is the time for our comeuppance! It’s a joke because the world of algorithmic extraction, including AI, doesn’t exist without the vast world of knowledge, culture and content generation to which universities have participated both quantity and quality. And sure, the joke is partly on us. It’s on me too, on this website, though I think I have a better sense of the pharmacological exchange I am making than most. I know I am paying more than the listed price. We all are.

We need to consider this aspect of educational technologies. We know students are paying in tuition and fees, but what other exchanges are taking place? What arrangements are we in as faculty and staff with university platforms and subscription cloud services? I think as faculty we have had these questions in mind, but the circumstances are shifting rapidly. The web has shifted from being an external element to study in the 2000s to becoming institutional platforms.

So we must ask what it means that university life is conditioned by our inhabitation of these technologies.

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