Digital Endosymbiosis

Digital Endosymbiosis is a realignment of universals and particulars between the activities that take place in an institution and those which take place outside it. At the moment, disciplinary discourse is confused about what is particular and what is universal. One has only to look at the critical discourse to see the identification of "pathology" in various areas (obesity? bullying? global warming?), with little attempt to see that all pathologies have the same structure with specific realisations. As the tools we use to teach become better and more refined, the underlying patterns of universals will become increasingly apparent. However, I think it is likely that these tools will emerge inter-institutionally because this will be the most effective way that institutions can realise their plans to "digitalize" the curriculum. 

This seems to be what's happening in Copenhagen, where I think real progress has been made on our digitalization project (steering collective understanding of something nobody understands is hard - but we're getting there). Also in the last week, I have been running the Global Scientific Dialogue course in Vladivostok, which will feed into an inter-institutional initiative from the Russians in the form of a Learning Futures Laboratory. I see no reason why these things shouldn't come together. Meanwhile, just to remind me of how current institutional arrangements are not viable, also this week I have been in some pretty intense negotiations with my former university about intellectual property and potential commercialisation of a project I have been involved in for 5 years.  Everything seems to happen at once. Having said that, it may all be quite good in the end.

The Global Scientific Dialogue course was excellent - again. This year I did much more around technical skill - it really is a course that is tool-led, rather than content-led - and the tools I introduced the students to included AI, Google colab and P5. All of this is framed around asking "big questions" about the future, wicked problems, etc, for which they work in small groups supervised by a team of 20 teachers. I was worried I had lost them because I tried to do something quite ambitious with Python generating word-clouds with the students own data. Actually, it turns out that many gained exactly what I'd hoped: "programming is not so easy, but it is really interesting, I realise I can do it, and I want to know more". In a course for people many of whom have never programmed before, you can't hope for more than that. And there was a remarkable moment when those students who were more experienced effectively "took over" the class to help those who were struggling, each student sharing their screen, and other Russian students talking them through how to fix their problems. I've never seen that before online - it was like "Twitch does programming". 

In Copenhagen there's been some tension around whether digitalization is about changing the curriculum (and so developing more technical skill in students), or if it is about changing teaching. It is, of course, both. The problem we have in teaching in institutions today is that all our technology has been taken over by industrial concerns. This is the deep reason why education has become increasingly transactional - the industrial systems we use are transactional. I've hatched a plan to challenge this by developing new teaching tools in-house which invite students into a collaborative process of making those tools better, and so are introduced to the technical discourse outside. Moreover, this improvement process can be done inter-institutionally. Vladivostok, Copenhagen and Liverpool might be my first pilot users.  It means that institutions can start to build a technical niche for themselves in a shared environment which connects them more directly with the world outside. Without getting carried away by this, it may mean that in the fullness of time, the inter-institutional niche becomes the main focus of educational activity, with institutionally-bound activities become more specifically focused on deep conversation around disciplines and research. I see it as a kind of institutional endosymbiosis - universals outside, particulars inside. 

I think if there's a thread that runs through everything it is that the internet will eventually transform the institution of education in ways that it clearly hasn't until now. It won't be about online classes or any other online reproduction of the traditional academy. It will be about the necessity of every individual to adapt to the digital environment as it is actually unfolding, not as institutions teach it. This necessity will mean that something will happen between institutions, not inside them. The institution will not die, but it will change into something other than what it is at the moment. As tools for teaching different subjects are refined, it will become increasingly obvious that our tools reveal the commonalities between our disciplines - universals. Beyond the development of deeper tools for inquiry, the need is for institutions to to conduct the conversation about particulars. This is what I suspect the disciplinary discourse will turn into - much more about the discovery of special cases in nature or society - a critical movement which feeds into the ongoing refinement of our universals.