People sitting on the floor round a table.

Stephen Downes has written a couple of articles relating Generative AI (GenAI) and Open Education Resources (OER). In the first one, he responds to a blog post by Heather Ross, who argues that the “sould of open is in danger.” Downes is having none of it, and responds to her point by point.

I’m in agreement with all of it, and particularly with how ‘gatekeep-y’ (my word) the OER community can be. (I say this with deep love and respect for what the OER community has achieved, but it is somewhat insular and ivory tower-focused.)

There are a few people who have created a cottage industry for themselves by opposing every aspect of artificial intelligence. I think they’re wrong, and have concerns about them misleading educators about AI. But Heather Ross’s article takes it a step further.

This is colonialism:

“No, you don’t get to wash over or destroy the work we’ve done and the great work still to come within the open movement.” If those encouraging the use of GenAI for open or for GenAI to replace open want to play a new game, that’s fine. We can’t stop you, but get off our field.”

It’s not your field.

And then, in the second post, which contains too many excellent and nuanced thoughts to summarise adequately, Downes sets his sights on what we mean by ‘free learning’. I’m sharing the part about colonialism because I think he gets to the nub of the problem: what people are often complaining about when they’re complaining about AI as ‘colonialist’ is that they are being colonised.

This is, of course, a problem, but the underlying issues are much more structural than people usually think. As Downes points out, what is necessary here isn’t to merely perpetuate the mindset of ‘giving’ people education, but rather to find ways “for a community to communicate with itself” in ways that reduce their reliance on other (usually more powerful) communities and interests.

The only real difference between what we’ll call ‘AI colonialism’ and ‘Good Old Fashioned Colonialism’ is in who is being colonized and who is doing the colonizing. In the case of GOFC, it was one nation colonizing another. In the case of AIC, it is one sector of the economy colonizing the rest. Though if we pause and consider for a bit we’ll find it’s not so different after all: in most societies, developed and otherwise, there is a structural colonialism, where one wealthier sector of society extracts value from the other, and then sells (or in the case of charity, ‘gives’) it back as a value-laden alternative.

I am so sympathetic with those who are opposing AI on these grounds, though my charity is extended only grudgingly to those who have only recently made the switch from colonizer to colonized. And my real loyalties are with those who have always been colonized - not only those in Eswatini (who have to their credit have resisted colonization better than many) but also those in my own society and those like mine, who contribute with their language(s), system of laws, culture and traditions, social knowledge, values and beliefs, etc., and find an educational system - and knowledge economy generally - sold back to them, inevitably changed by the values and beliefs of those who performed the appropriation.

This is an unsustainable model. Over time, it not only reduces the wealth of the subjected population, it also reduces the capacity of the provider (or ‘donor’) community generate wealth without these inputs (one imagines that a company like Disney would flounder without the privilege to incorporate and repurpose Arab or Indigenous culture and folklore).

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Whether or not AI succeeds as a technology is moot; neither blocking AI nor regulating the industry will alter the model of aggregation and exploitation that it exemplifies. The knowledge, learning and information industries will continue to exist, and with or without AI will continue to harvest community language(s), system of laws, culture and traditions, social knowledge, values and beliefs, etc., and in some fashion reshape them according to their own values and sell them back to the community.

And this brings us back to what, to my mind, is the real purpose of open educational resources. They represent a means, mostly (though not exclusively) through digital technology, for a community to communicate with itself, to gather and share knowledge, to pass along its values and mores, its ideas and beliefs, and to be able to do this without reliance on external knowledge, information and learning providers.

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It - to me, at least - was never about giving people an education (or giving them rights, or freedoms or anything else). It was about people being able to create these things for itself.

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Image: tribesh kayastha