Tell us about yourself? What are you working on and why are you at Internetdagarna?
I work as a senior officer at Lärarförbundet, the Swedish teachers union. I am responsible for digitalisation in schools. Currently, we are mostly talking about digitalisation in school as a work environment issue, how digital systems can both, disturb and help the work environment. A lot of the systems you are supposed to use actually disturb the teaching and we want to see how we can change that. How the teachers can be the change agents for deciding what to use and what not to use based on good information.
When did something related to the internet last make you hopefull or happy?
At the moment I am just looking at the really bad examples, I am here, at Internetdagarna today to find good examples. Currently, we see a lot of bad examples.
When did something related to the internet last make you upset, afraid or angry?
There is this Swedish research Institute IFAU they are about to release a study on the 1to1 solution (each student and teacher gets a computer) and the study shows that it has no effect at all. The municipalities used a lot of money to finance those devices and that budget could have been spent much better.
@LinneaPC, great to have you here! We are looking forward to discussing the findings and topics of the workshop with you and see how we can collaborate and inspire in the future:
@erik_lonroth organises the Teaching Teachers open-source workshop and @LinneaPC is responsible for digitalisation at the Swedish teachers union. I am sure there will be some interesting exchange here!
Det vore fantastiskt om vi kunde etablera en kontakt med dig. Vi skulle behöva veta hur vi når ut till lärare i stort och vilka andra arbeten som kan påverkas av oss som vill förändra digitaliseringen till att inrikta sig på fri och öppen mjukvara.
Jag har jobbat för detta i över ett decennium och att nå ut till lärare är oerhört viktigt.
I have a perhaps helpful reflection that I know I am not the first to have made:
Digitalization and computer systems lend themselves to centralized decisions, and this was the most aggressive charge leveraged against computerization in the 1960s and 1970s. The Skolverket might, for instance, decide to create an application service for high school for 14 year olds to facilitate the administration of applications under the fria skolval. However, what ends up happening is that parents and kids turn to teachers with questions about the interface and application process, in spite of teachers being far away both from the process of designing the interface and not being responsible for the application process either.
So while for Skolverket the centralized system for applications under the fria skolval is indeed a time-saver that enables efficiency, for the individual teachers it becomes a time-hog since they have to spend time explaining to individual students/parents systems that they are not well-placed to understand or explain. It sub-optimizes by creating an easily measurable “central” advantage that translates into a more difficult to measure “decentral” disadvantage (see also @nadia 's 4th principle here: 5 New Principles for Justice in the age of AI (and other networked technologies)? - #3 by nadia )
This is profound, @teirdes – and thanks to @LinneaPC for bringing it up (welcome Linnea, sorry for noticing your post so late!). And it seems fundamental, not related to the Internet at all. In Seeing like a state, James Scott has this very interesting observation that administrative ordering tends to overextend. And when it does, someone else gets dumped with the price to pay. The context of this observation is urban planning, and in particular the city of Brasilia, built from the ground up as a high modernist project. What happened there is that the “rational” city designed by Niemeyer could not function as a city, because it had no cheap accommodation, no street food, no hangouts etc. And so, promptly, favelas arose, to host the workers that were building the official Brasilia, and to perform the essential services that a city must provide, but that become incredibly difficult to produce under too strict and administrative grid. He puts it this way: the informal city underwrites the formal one, just like the teachers underwrite Skolverket’s new system for applications.