Thoughts – The Rhizoblog

Still Becomings

I was generously invited to speak and close the tenth and final MEL Intensive Week and International Conference on the 21st August 2026. The week had indeed been very intense and emotional, with long days, late nights and little in the way of free time. Speaking right at the end of such a week and of an entire degree program was always going to be a challenge. To be frank, it did not go well and the whole occasion got the better of me, and I do not think I was able to express the things that I wanted to say. This post is an attempt to address that. This is not the script of what I planned to say, but rather my writing to express my feelings about the occasion.

Still Becomings

The title was planned to have an unresolved ambiguity that might even be understood as an oxymoron. The first word “still”, is it being used to mean unmoving, static or as continuing, carrying on? Then “becomings”, used in plural on purpose and suggesting the latter meaning of still, but why not a singular becoming? I admit that I was playing with words and also wanting to present something very authentic and personal about my ideas, in a way that made readers ask “what?”.

I did feel the genuine weight of being the closing speaker and in the weeks leading up to the event I pondered for a long time about what form it should take.

Should it be a eulogy for the program and all that it stood for? That felt too melancholy, too much of a wallowing in what had been, in the loss. Anyway, the week had been framed as a celebration, not a mourning. Also, with the evolution of MEL into the new association, the International Network for Educational Leadership (INEL), this was in some ways a birth or rebirth (resurrection?). Although the university has ended the degree program, the spirit of MEL, the community, the people, the ideas and the values – all of those are still very much alive – and Still Becoming.

Those who know me will not be surprised that the next idea was a polemic. After all I have been known to rant, to be the old man who shouts at clouds. That felt off as well though. No matter what frustrations I might be feeling, this was not the time and place to be venting, late on a Friday afternoon. I would be lying if I said I was not tempted, but the rebellious old punk is, it seems, also Still Becoming.

A lecture then? I am after all, allegedly, according to my current employer, a Senior Lecturer. But there had already been lectures and keynotes by speakers much more qualified and interesting than me. Who wants more content to think about at 17:00 on a Friday after a tough week? I do not feel like a lecturer, I feel like I am an Educator and I am Still Becoming an Educator.

So, what to do? What is this?

It is a heartfelt and sincere Thank You.

On Encounters

On encounters that change us,
conditions we leave behind,
and what it means to still be becoming.

The description of the talk, as it appeared in the programme

I ask for your indulgence as I work through this description.

Encounters. I want to thank everyone in MEL for the encounters, alumni, students, colleagues and friends.

Thank you for the encounters that changed me.

The encounters with each of you, as individuals and together as community.

Encounters with your work and ideas.
During intensive weeks.
During Online Open Office Hours (OOOHS).
In your forum posts and comments. Oh the forum posts – often like deep dark rich chocolate cake – so good, so filling…
In your Key Assessed Tasks.
In the community we have built outside the institution, in LinkedIn and the book club that became MELOH.

Over 200 alumni and students in that LinkedIn group. The legacy map with over 150 pins representing you located all around the world.

In the friendships that have developed and been maintained and now with the next stage as MEL evolves into INEL – the encounters that are Still Becoming.

MEL itself was a continuation, an evolution. It has DNA and the roots and origins can be traced back. MEL did not come from nowhere, everything comes from somewhere and is always in the process of becoming something else.

So, here I need to acknowledge some of the influences that led to MEL.

I acknowledge 21st Century Educators, an earlier program designed by Hanna Davis and Marko Teräs. If there had not been an encounter in a hotel bar in Melbourne at an international conference then MEL might not exist and I would almost certainly not live in Finland. There might well be some sort of degree, as the conditions in ‘idea space’ were conducive to something being developed, but it would not be what we are celebrating as MEL.

The influence of the team led by Carita Prokki when I first moved here – my own recollection is that the seeds of an idea were partly germinated during a talk I had on a flight back from Brazil with Carita, about what degrees we could offer as a continuation of 21st Century Educators. An encounter on a flight and a teacher education program starts its evolution to a degree.

This is serendipity.

So, my message here is this.
Be open to these moments.
Be sensitive to the chance encounters – the plurality of possible futures that we have.
Often, we do not know we are even having life changing encounters until after the event.

There are also other types of encounter.

When I introduced Gert Biesta on the Friday morning, I said how influential and important his work has been to me and to this program, and that is true. But of course, not only him. There is also Paulo Freire, and the whole critical pedagogy ‘gang’ of Shor, hooks et al. Then there are others, such as Neil Selwyn, Tim Fawns. Hartmut Rosa. And on, and on, and on and the point here is not to give you a reading list of thinkers – you can go back to Moodle or contact me for that if you wish.

This is a sort of canon. Or if not a canon, then at least a field of scholarship, and I have been in encounters with it for years. Reading. Reflecting. Thinking. Pondering. Letting things percolate. Percolate with the rich chocolate cake!

What I only really noticed later, after MEL had been running for a few years, is that what MEL offered its participants was not only that canon, not only content and the readings, but it was also the thing that allowed the encounter to be metabolised.
The time.
The space.
The structure.
Permission to sit with something difficult and not rush to a resolution or understanding.

I hope and suspect for many of you it is Still Becoming, because those ideas do not stop working on you when the KAT and the Thesis are submitted.

The problem we face is that we are usually in systems that require these encounters to deliver prescribed and measurable outcomes. That assume that education is a sort of engineering or production problem based on cause and effect. But we all know that not to be true, that there are infinite variables, that it is risky and unpredictable. That really teaching is an art and craft and not a science. Anyone who has tried to educate knows that each educational encounter is unique and that things can go in unexpected ways. There is a haecceity to education, a ‘thisness’, and it is this that makes complete control and predictability impossible.

Resonance requires giving up control over both what we encounter and the process of encountering it, and at the same time being able – and trusting in our ability – to reach out to this other side and establish responsive contact with it.

Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2020)

I would ask you to indulge me while I briefly offer an example of this ‘letting go’ of control from the MEL program, the Key Assessed Task. I designed the Key Assessed Tasks in my courses as one small way to open things up and let go of some control, to let you decide what to produce and how. I tried to not just gesture towards Biesta’s ‘beautiful risk’ but to embrace it.

This was not because I do not care about assessment, it is because I felt that is how it should be done on a program like MEL. We need to open up space and opportunity and not close it down to something that was convenient and efficient for a teacher to assess to standardised metrics.

What I came to understand was that holding on to control had been serving me, not you. Having control made me feel like a competent educator in charge of things. But did that help you?

I love the work you do for the Key Assessed Tasks. When you too embrace the freedom and choices you have. I also admit that I still dislike sitting in judgement of them.

In the section above I have been writing mostly about the first part of the talk description, the encounter. How encounters change us, change us whether we plan them or not and change us whether we wanted it or not.

On Legacy

When I was invited to speak to close the conference, someone, and I really cannot recall who it was, called it the Legacy Keynote.

This got me thinking a lot about this word – legacy. What is a legacy?

If legacy isn’t about what you’ve achieved or accumulated; but about the conditions you leave behind for others to thrive, what would it mean to measure your legacy not by the milestones you’ve reached, but by the doors you’ve opened, the burdens you’ve lifted, and the possibilities you’ve nurtured for those who come next?

Aiden Cinnamon Tea & Dorothy Ladybugboss, Burnout From Humans (2024)

“…conditions you leave behind for others to thrive…”
“…the doors you have opened…”
“…the possibilities you have nurtured…”

This is you – this is what you do in education and as educators and as educational leaders.

This leads me to ask a question.

What is the legacy of MEL?

It is not the degree. The degree is ending. I do not think it is the credits, or the certificates, though I hope they have been useful and I know for some of you they matter a great deal. I do not disregard or disrespect the importance of these. But are they legacy, I think not.

I do not think it is the content or the curriculum, even though we spent time thinking and reflecting on these.

The legacy was there on that Friday and is ongoing now as I write this. You came back. You joined online. At your own expense and from all over the world. To be with peers, with friends, to meet new people and like-minded people, and to be a part of this network. That moves me, and that is why it was so hard to speak on the day of the keynote.

This is not about the degree or the university, but it is about the people. You. Students and Alumni organised the week. People who graduated years ago were sitting next to people who finished last year and students who have yet to finish.

There is the book club that turned into MELOH.

There is a map with over 150 pins in it. There are friendships in this community that will, for sure, outlast the thing that made them.

And now, just emerging, there is a new network with a name and a constitution and built without an educational institution sitting behind it. This is because of all of you.

That is the legacy of MEL. The Conditions left behind.

Not only what is left, but what carries forward when people announced that it would stop.

So, what was the program really trying to do at a level deeper than credentialism? I would say, not delivering content and not achieving outcomes.

It was making conditions. As already stated, the Time. Space. Structure. Permission.

A group of people who are willing to take each other seriously.
A group of people who are willing and able to trust each other.
And then getting out of the way of whatever happened next. Letting the ‘beautiful risk’ play out.

These are the possibilities we have nurtured. This is challenging in contemporary educational contexts. It is hard to defend to those we are accountable to because this stuff is hard to measure and quantify. It does not fit very well as a Key Performance Indicator.

So, what do we do?

How can we work on what we think really matters within systems and structures that perhaps prioritise other metrics and ways of understanding what education is?

On Doors and Cracks

I have been doing some thinking about that and I have been influenced by the Yoruba, Nigerian thinker, writer and philosopher, Báyò Akómoláfé. He writes about the structures of institutions and organisations, society and culture. In particular he writes about doors and about cracks!

As he states, doors behave themselves. They are an integral part of the design, and they grant access and also permit exit. They are a technology that maintains the logic of the institution (Akomolafe, 2024). Doors are the prescribed way that we should move through the institution.

But cracks, as Bayo goes on to say, cracks do not behave. We do not design cracks, but they enable some flex and they can allow some interesting things to happen. Cracks “…are not ‘solutions’, not guarantees, not final answers” (Akomolafe, 2024). I think this is what makes cracks more interesting than doors.

I have come to see MEL as perhaps a crack that had to pretend to be a door in order to be allowed to exist.

I know I am being heavy on the metaphor here and it may well break down on close analysis, I do not know because I am still thinking it through, still becoming. But here is my thinking. Institutions need structure and things like –
Learning outcomes.
Credits.
Competency frameworks.
Curricula.
Schedules.

These are all like doors in the structure of the organisation.

They are important.
They are necessary.
All of it approved, all of it in the right font with the permitted image and colour scheme.

Through the crack come the things that actually matter. Not just the light that Leonard Cohen celebrates in “Anthem”, but also –
The conversation that went somewhere nobody planned, not drifting off course, but seeking a rabbit hole and, like Alice, enjoying an adventure.
The thesis that changed what somebody believed about their own school or about the very purpose of education itself.
The Intensive Week session that opened a Pandora’s box.
The bits that were not on the schedule.
The things not in the curriculum – the liquid, the flow.

But cracks are fragile, and eventually somebody notices that they are there. They are dangerous and have to be repaired and filled in.

But now and then, when you can – when you feel able, I urge you all to take the risk and to play in the cracks.

On Time

Playing in the cracks is risky and it also takes time and as I have already written, I think one of the vital things that MEL provided was time and space.

To do that I think we have to consider being inefficient and slowing down. This seems counter intuitive perhaps, but think it through.

Time is a condition underneath all the others, and it is the one that institutions find hard to permit. We live now in an age of acceleration and pressure to be efficient, to rush, to learn faster, to accredit what we know already rather than learn anew, graduate quicker, summarise, cut corners. And underneath it all, the veiled instruction: do not spend time thinking critically.

There is, it seems to me, no time to wonder, no time to ponder.

Time.

Not efficiency. Not speed. Not productivity. Time to sit with something difficult and wrestle with it. As Haraway would say, to stay with the trouble.

Bayo Akomolafe says:

The times are urgent,
let us slow down.

An African saying, shared by Bayo Akomolafe in A Slower Urgency

A lot of what I like about MEL came out of slowness and inefficiency.
The long forum threads.
The Open Office Hour where we talked for almost 2 hours.
The Intensive Weeks, where the value was never really the content of the sessions but the coffee and corridors and the dinners and the walk back to the hotel.

You cannot schedule an encounter. You can only make room for one and hope that it might happen. So please take the beautiful risk that one might happen.

Still Becoming

So, what now?

Nothing here is finished.
That is the whole point of the title. Nothing is finished, everything is Still Becoming.

MEL is becoming INEL.
The community is becoming whatever you make of it next.

Many of you are becoming something different in your own schools and systems, and that process did not stop when you submitted your thesis.

I am also Still Becoming, and I have no real idea what into, and at my age, that is a better position to be in than I perhaps expected.

Octavia Butler put it better than I can.

All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.

Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993), from Earthseed: The Books of the Living

That is the whole argument of this talk really, there in those lines.

You changed me.
I hope some of what happened here changed you.
And the changing is not over, for any of us.

I said at the start this was a thank you, and it is. I said at the start that I was not sure what the final words of the MEL conference and program should be and I decided that from me it should be a question.

Not like me to leave you with a question, is it?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day” (1990)

Thank you. All of you.

References

Akomolafe, B. (n.d.). A slower urgency. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/a-slower-urgency

Akomolafe, B. (2024). On doors and \cracks\. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/on-doors-and-cracks

Biesta, G. J. J. (2013). The beautiful risk of education. Routledge.

Butler, O. E. (1993). Parable of the sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.

Cinnamon Tea, A., & Ladybugboss, D. [Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, V.]. (2024). Burnout from humans: A little book about AI that is not really about AI. Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. https://burnoutfromhumans.net

Oliver, M. (1990). The summer day. In House of light. Beacon Press.

Rosa, H. (2020). The uncontrollability of the world (J. C. Wagner, Trans.). Polity Press. (Original work published 2018)

Educational Trends in 2022

I always have such good intentions for writing and then events seem to get in the way and block the actual process of putting fingers to keyboard. I have notebooks with all kinds of ideas for posts, but sadly they never seem to get from the notebook to these pages and so it is that months have passed since my last post.

In that period I have moved house and also run the first face to face intensive week for the degree program I co-lead since the fall of 2019.

So, now I am starting off again teaching a course that looks at the trends and innovations taking place in contemporary education. It is disappointing to note that I also wrote a post on starting to teach this course two years ago in this blog and I did not manage to follow through with further posts!

I am very fortunate to be “teaching” (which is quite the wrong word) this to a diverse group of post-graduate students located across the world. I am therefore very much looking forward to exploring the trends and innovations that are happening in their own contexts.

I therefore think it timely to reflect a little and comment on what I experience as the trends in my own context and how they impact teachers, students and the process of education. This is quite challenging to do without launching into a polemic rant that would probably do little except release the stress and frustration that has been building up, like the safety valve on a pressure cooker. I do not want to be a curmudgeonly old man, seemingly complaining about everything.

This then is a serious attempt to write about the situation as I experience it. The main trend that I have seen emerge over the last decade and then raise to prominence in the last two years is that of educational leaders becoming entirely focussed on finance and budget to the expense of all other aspects of education.

This is not to claim that the financial survival of an educational institution is of no importance, but rather a feeling that senior leadership seem to have lost sight of the actual reason that we exist at all, in other words the question of purpose. This then gets transmitted down to middle managers by the metrics and KPI’s that are monitored and by which they are judged as successful or not.

Interestingly this then can also lead to contradictions and misalignments between what is tracked and measured and what the institution states are its strategic objectives and values.

This focus on income and costs, mean that staff and leaders lose sight of the actual reason that we exist, and all aspects of education become financialised. The drivers for this are, in my opinion, political and economic, but also to some extent also just the result of poorly thought through strategies that result in unforeseen consequences.

None of this is new, Gert Biesta wrote an excellent book that touches on this topic in his “Good Education in an Age of Measurement” in 2011 and researchers like Stephen Ball have spent much of their career focussing on this. Despite this, I am still experiencing this as an ’emerging trend’ because it now seems that we are in a time when education is a commodity, the process transactional and the only focus of those in charge is the spreadsheet of KPI’s.

The knock-on effects of this impact curriculum, pedagogy, processes, support and mental wellbeing and, of course, technology adoption.

In a future post I plan to unwrap this a bit more in terms of specific and concrete examples and how these play out in a contemporary public sector university focussed on professional and vocational education.

Becoming Postmodern?

Almost exactly a year ago, in early May 2021, just prior to my operation and having received my cancer diagnosis, I was out walking when I was struck by a number of thoughts relating to my own positionality with regard to modernity. I tried to capture these in very rough note format.

Time passes and because of all that was going on, I just forgot about them. Yesterday I came across the notes again while sorting out files and so I have decided to post them here. Apologies if they seem unstructured and poorly written and a bit random. I am also not sure exactly where I am now in relation to these thoughts and that is probably something that I will return to later. Here they are below the image, for what they are worth.

These are random thoughts that came to me while out walking. They are not in the form of a paper, there is not real structure and I have not organised them or referenced them or anything. Like much of these ramblings, I am not sure that they will ever come to more than this setting down right now.

As I walked along it came to me that I was afflicted by another infection that has crept up on me over the years and come to dominate my being, but that until recently I had no name or framework and no way of really expressing the various views, opinion and feelings that I have.

In short, it came to me that I have in fact become infected with Postmodernism. I will try and explain the reasons for my diagnosis but, as I say, the main realisation is that this is not new. I have had these various thoughts and symptoms for some time, but I did not know what to call them or how to link them into a single contagion with multiple indications.

The most powerful indicator of my problem may well be the way that my belief in grand narratives have completely melted away over the last decade. (Lyotard) Perhaps this initially started as early the 1980’s when I began to have doubts about capitalism. However, I told myself that in fact although I did not agree with how capitalism was working, it was working to do exactly what it is meant to do, that is redistribute wealth and power to the small minority of capitalists while exploiting everyone else and the world at large. I though that capitalism was actually very good and efficient at this, as I had seen first-hand, of which more later. More recently though I have come to see that capitalism itself is really in trouble, that we really are now in the period of “late capitalism” and that it will collapse. The pandemic has made many of its faults and fractures all too visible and these will split further despite the attempts of those in power to shore up the decaying structure. This was of course predicted, and it is, at least by my logic, inevitable. So, the first grand narrative, the first “ism” to feel my doubt was capitalism.

When capitalism fails, the capitalists all quickly become socialists expecting to tap into public funds to keep their systems and structures working. They are after all, “Too big to fail” – we saw this the financial crisis with banks and financial institution, and we have seen it in the pandemic as well. Of course, it is done in the name of “protecting jobs” and other such worthy causes. These are the very same jobs that the capitalist would happily offshore, externalise or replace with technology as long as it reduced their costs and maximised their profits. There is something that causes nausea to me to see a multimillionaire who was happy to reap these profits in good times, basically begging the public purse of the government for money, all the while relaxing in glorious luxury on a private island and not at all troubled by the harsh realities of the pandemic on normal people. In fact, even more puke inducing is when the same normal people then hero worship the said multimillionaire as some kind of hero to be admire and to aspire to, (yes I am looking at you Mr. Branson) why is that?

So, having come to socialism, or at least socialism for the rich, I came to see though that my belief in socialism has also evaporated. Another “ism” lost to me. I know of course that the models of so called “actual real socialism” we have seen implemented prior to the collapses of the late 1980’s early 1990s’ were actually nothing of the sort, but that in a way proves my justification for no longer holding any belief in the narratives of socialist theory. As to communism itself – do I even need to elaborate now?

My time in the benign dictatorships of the Middle East started the process of dissolving my belief in democracy. Not because I was not enamoured with being watched over by the loving kindness of absolute rulers, but the way that living in a different system enabled me to pull away some of the veil that covers our deference of democracy as a system. For one thing, so many so-called democratic systems are anything but that. I refer here to not only the systems where all opposition is either illegal, disallowed or executed, where there is only one name on the ballot paper and you had better vote for it, but also of the many two party, first past the post systems where the government may not be any sort of real representation of the voting preferences of the people. Election and referendum results in the last decade has clearly shown some of the many flaws in these systems.

Further, what, in any real sense of the word, is a vote every four or five years a representation of a democratic process? Indeed, we frequently mix up the word’s ‘election’ with ‘democracy’, using them almost interchangeably to mean the same thing. All of this ignores the problems of democratic, economic and political literacy – of undermining education systems so that the electorate is simply unable to make democratic decisions and the process becomes one based on media soundbites and populist declarations that can be flipped on the basis of new data from a focus group and trending Twitter hashtags. Having introduced education to this polemic, it is my intention to return to that topic later, given it has pretty well been my life’s work. To regroup my thinking, my claim is that I no longer believe in the grand narratives of capitalism, socialism or democracy. Unfortunately, it gets worse though. For I have realised that I no longer actually believe in progress itself! Yes, it is true that we have tackled many of the problems, threats and improved the quality of life for so many human beings on the planet. But at what cost? Life on the planet itself – mass extinction, use of finite resources – we have a model of progress that depends upon continuous growth – this is not possible and also not sustainable, this is a myth, even in the digital world. The pandemic is one example of the hyperobjects which threaten us, there will be new pandemics, the climate crisis is another hyperobject and we will see increasing use of violence and wars due to the complex geopolitical situations we face.

I think there is other evidence of my infection, such as religion, my views on money, banking, finance and economics, especially after reading some Baudrillard and his ideas on simulacra. So, this chain of thought might be continued.

Back to my blog

It has been a long while since I wrote here and much has happened in the world at large and in my own life, a lot of it not at all good, but here we are for now, still standing but sad for those many who are not.

At a global level we have seen the devastating affects of the global pandemic across all aspects of human life. This is not over yet, despite the deeply rooted desire that so many have to call time. We do not know what new variants will emerge and their characteristics and to not plan for worst case scenarios is just irresponsible. We should not fall into despair, we need to be hopeful but careful and prepared.

Democracy around the world is now in decline again, with the rise of more authoritarian regimes, populist leaders, and the rise of those who wish to roll back basic human rights.

And now we see war again in Europe and the threat of an escalation that may involve other countries and the appalling use of chemical and nuclear weapons. Many have found this shocking, we thought that we were beyond this and yet, here we are.

All of this is set against the all too visible impacts of a climate crisis that needs to be addressed with urgency. It is all to easy to feel overwhelmed with these multiple but interconnected crisis taking place at the macro level and their all too obvious impact on daily life. My plan is to write on all of the above topics to help myself better understand and deal with what is taking place.

On a personal level I dealt with being diagnosed with cancer last year. That is also an experience that I think has changed me and my priorities. I am fortunate enough to be in a country with an excellent public healthcare service and I am so sincerely grateful to all the wonderful staff in Finnish healthcare who treated me. I owe you my life. I have had surgery and treatment and, for now, I am fine and my health is improving physically and psychologically. I need to shout out my good friends and family who also were so vital in supporting me, especially those whose dark humour helped me through serious times. This I will also write about in the future posts. For now though, thank you – you know who you are.

What a time to be reemerging into the public sphere by writing. Though, as I state in the About section, I mostly write for myself. If you get something from reading it, then that is the cherry on top of the cream and icing, on top of the cake, on the plate, on the table.

Futures, Trends and Innovations in Education -First Thoughts

I started writing this post several weeks ago, but the pressure of work meant that it did not get completed and published until now.

I recently started co-teaching an MBA course called Emerging Trends and Innovation in Education which has led to me reflecting on education and its relationship with time. It strikes me that the future is part of the raison d’être of education, for without a future of some kind there would seem to me to be little point to education. I think this holds true whether you define education and its purpose more broadly or you use a more narrowly defined characterisation that focuses on formal schooling. One aspect of the pandemic has been that it has made visible the many important functions and roles that teachers and formal schooling play in society. In my view is that this is a good thing for parents, employers and politicians to appreciate that the role of teachers and schools is not limited to the delivery of a curriculum.

Although there are those who lobby for tradition and the “maintenance of standards”, often harping back to some imagined golden age when things were better, it is still their desire to transmit this golden past into the future. So although backward looking, the overall aim is recreate this ‘glorious past’ in the future.

As I am often stating, the question then arises of whether we see the role of education as that of maintaining the status quo, of continuing the world as it now exists or, if the objective is to change the world in some way. If it is the latter, then a wider debate emerges of what that change looks like. It is for this reason that I often become frustrated with those who simply call to improve education and make it better. Better for whom and it what ways? Improve how and for what ends? Without clarity these are just empty platitudes. This is also one of the reasons why I believe that education is always political, not in a party political way, but in terms of whether the objective is stability or change and if change, then what type of change.

Postcard by French commercial artist Jean-Marc Côté in 1899 to commemorate the 1900 world’s fair, “Exposition Universelle,” in Paris. This is his vision of education in the year 2000. The postcards were later published in a book with Isaac Asimov in 1986.

Education has a long history of trying to predict the future and I have no doubt this will continue. As I write this post there are countless projects trying to predict what “post pandemic” education, schools and universities will look like, all with various interest groups vying to push their own agendas. Therefore educational leaders and teachers need to be aware and mindful of of those who are trying to create these futures and frame the narrative. This does not mean we should resist all change or be cynical, but it does mean engaging critically in the debate.

My clone, who lives in the cloud.

I have a clone and it lives in the cloud. Many people have such a clone.

Scene 1.

I climb aboard the bus and swipe my bus pass. It bleeps and the green glow of the circular light confirms I can board. It’s 15:56 at Tenniskeskus, bus stop number 5043. In a database somewhere in the cloud the link is made between me, my journey, my address, my payment details and contact information. Here are all the details of my travel by public transport. In my pocket the GPS of my phone and the mobile phone masts confirm the same journey.

Scene 2.

I am at the checkout of Prisma (a large supermarket chain, like Tesco’s or Walmart). Each item scanned and totalled, the frequent customer card swiped and the data detailing what I have purchased, when and where is captured and in a database somewhere this logged and connected to my profile and payment details.

Scene 3.

I am on the internet using social media to stay in contact with friends and family. As I scroll through my stream, neatly configured by my previous use so as to try to ensure my addiction and engagement, by a ‘blackboxed’ algorithm. I slow to read a post, the cookies note that I slow and read, that I liked, or expressed some other emotional reaction. Perhaps I comment or post a gif. Captured. To the cloud. Logged. Tracked.

Scene 4.

A friend emails me on Gmail and I reply, we discuss health and world affairs and family matters. The algorithms scan the mail, looking for the key words so as to build and develop the huge library of data being stored. Sold to advertisers, part of the surveillance economy and the data exhaust of the ‘free’ use of these technologies.

Scene 5.

My writing for work is co-authored on Google Docs, collected and stored, then, when submitted and posted to databases, further logged and collected. Details of who reads it, where they are located, captured and noted.

Scene 6.

Images of me are tagged by friends and family and attached to my profiles for work, bureaucratic and social purposes. Facial recognition software recognises me. Someone starts a meme posting photos with a ten-year age gap, so that the machine can learn how we change as we age. Another friend does a quiz of social media to see what kind of dog they would be and the fact that they are my friend is collected and stored along with so much else.

I could go on and on, but the point is made. There exists this huge, almost unimaginable set of data points about us, our choices, our behaviours and opinions. What we read, what we borrow from the library, who we connect with, our friends and family. Our smart TV captures what we watch and when. What we write and post and how we react. Everything we have ever searched for on Google – think about that! That data might know me better than I know myself – or want to know and admit to myself.

Some of this data is already connected and aggregated. As a thought experiment, imagine if it were fully and seamlessly integrated. That the data was then plugged into bots and tools that would continue to post, comment, email, write and teach my online classes. Using machine learning and AI to replicate my style, my ticks and errors, my humour and cynicism. To generate “uncanny valley” pictures of me, perhaps doing new things, in new places with people I have never met, or perhaps even ones with people who do not actually exist in the real world. How long would it be able to fool people? It could even virtually duplicate journeys I did not actually make. It could post and reply to WhatsApp and text messages.

For everyone except those who see me face to face, my data clone would, I believe, pass the Turing test pretty well. My data clone lives in the cloud and knows so much more about me than I can remember about myself and about my life. Details of key dates and anniversaries and so much more. Can you recall in detail what you bought at the store on February 23^rd, 2018 at 16:43? It is there, the data is there, logged and tracked.

A clone who lives in the cloud, a ghost in the machine? I am not the first to consider these ideas. There is a science fiction podcast called LifeAfter that consideres how a digitally created loved one might serve as a comfort for the bereaved. There have also been those who seek to deliberately create the quantified self, but I think most have us have created clones without being aware that we were doing it.

I wonder how my clone is today, is it well, did it log and record this post and add it to the datafile? Was it me that wrote this, or my clone?

Welcome to a Rhizomatic World!

A first post to a new blog is always difficult. It feels in some ways like your first words to the world and you want to make a good first impression.

See the About Page for some background, if you are interested.