My presentation at the Educational Innovation in Economics and Business (EdinEB) conference next Wednesday (3 June), in Brighton.

1. Critically questioning educational
innovation in economics and
business: human interaction in a
virtualising world
Professor Richard Hall
@hallymk1 rhall1@dmu.ac.uk
richard-hall.org
EDinEB, University of Brighton // 3 June 2015

2. 1. Educational innovation reveals an entrepreneurial reconfiguring
of the idea of the University.
2. Educational innovation is a crack through which we might
analyse the transnational interests that drive value production
and accumulation.
3. In the face of socio-economic and environmental crises, is it
possible to reclaim the organising principles for the curriculum
as a more meaningful form of educational innovation?

3. I will say nothing about climate change and the
IPCC’s recommendations.
I will say nothing about liquid fuel availability and
peak oil.
I will say nothing about the emotional crisis of
sociability and anxiety inside higher education.
The triple crunch is for another day.

5. higher education, innovation and
the secular crisis

6. Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle Special Report provides
strategists and planners with an assessment of the
maturity, business benefit and future direction of
more than 2,000 technologies, grouped into 119
areas.
Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps the Journey to
Digital Business. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2819918
personal tutoring; peer mentoring; internationalisation and MOOCs; learning
analytics and retention/progression; teaching excellence framework; learning gain
and the HEAR; NSS and especially assessment and feedback; DSA;
employability and the FEER ; scholarship and the REF; and on; and on; and on.

7. Digital Marketing: Nexus of Forces (mobile, social, cloud and
information); consumers participate in marketing efforts to
gain greater social connection, or product and service value.
Digital Business: convergence of people, business and things;
physical assets become digitalized alongside already-digital
entities, such as systems and apps.
Autonomous: leverage technologies that provide humanlike or
human-replacing capabilities; autonomous vehicles or
cognitive systems.
Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps the Journey to Digital
Business. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2819918

8. Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps the Journey to Digital Business. http://gtnr.it/1swZR7r

9. CB Insights. 2014. Ed Tech Investment and Exit Report. http://bit.ly/1uxqExB

10. Office of Educational Technology. 2015. Ed Tech Developer’s
Guide. https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/

11. Office of Educational Technology. 2015. Ed Tech Developer’s Guide.
https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/

12. Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the
process of production by which he sustains his life, and
thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social
relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.
Marx, K. 2004. Capital Volume 1, p. 493.
It took both time and experience before the workpeople
learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment
by capital and to direct their attacks, not against the material
instruments of production, but against the mode in which they
are used.
Marx, K. 2004. Capital Volume 1, p. 554.

13. Value emerges as a form of sociability (as capital) from the
unity of three circuits. It is formed of moments of the
circulation of money, of production, and of commodities.
The self-expansion of value is “the determining purpose,
as the compelling motive.”
Marx, K. 1885. Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 4.
Accumulated value, and the power that flows from it,
means that other forms of human or humane value in the
production of commodities are marginalised.
Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism. 25(2): 11

14. Summers and Krugman (pace Hansen)
• systemic stagnation (population, education, inequality, debt)
• failure of monetary policy
• below-trend aggregate demand/growth, under-investment
• Total Factor Productivity, Human Capital Theory, innovation,
entrepreneurialism, family
Secular crisis 1

15. Michael Roberts
• the heart of the issue is the production for
profit by the private owners of the means of
production
• deleveraging; liquidation; productivity;
profitability
• production for profit aims constantly to reduce
the labour-time required for the production of
commodities, including labour-power
Secular crisis 2

16. Harry Cleaver
• counter-measures cannot resolve the
underlying problems of the system, rooted in
expansion and accumulation
• counter-measures undermine capitalism’s
legitimacy
Secular crisis 3

17. “a new disease… technological unemployment.”
“This means unemployment due to our discovery
of means of economising the use of labour
outrunning the pace at which we can find new
uses for labour.”
J.M. Keynes. 1930. Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

18. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of
high social importance, there will be great changes
in the code of morals.
social customs and economic practices, affecting
the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards
and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs,
however distasteful and unjust they may be in
themselves, because they are tremendously useful
in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall
then be free, at last, to discard.
J.M. Keynes. 1930. Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

19. Education markets are one facet of the neoliberal strategy to
manage the structural crisis of capitalism by opening the public
sector to capital accumulation.
Lipman, P. 2009: http://bit.ly/qDl6sV
Digitization is reducing labor content of services and products in an
unprecedented way, thus fundamentally changing the way
remuneration is allocated across labor and capital....
Mature economies will suffer most as they don't have the
population growth to increase autonomous demand nor powerful
enough labor unions or political parties to (re-)allocate gains in
what continues to be a global economy.
Gartner. 2013. Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users
for 2014 and Beyond. http://gtnr.it/17RLm2v

20. The difficulty of living in a society dominated by
value necessarily leads to the creation of all sorts
of ideologies to explain the suffering caused by
such a society and that enable the subjects of
labour to project onto others the qualities that they
are forced to expel from themselves.
[e.g. luddite, inefficient, digital immigrant,
uncreative, geek, nerd]
Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
25(2): 11

22. higher education, innovation
and the rule of money

23. the sociability of academic work is altered through
educational innovation:
1.for exchange > use [invested]
2.university reorganisation = efficiency +
productivity
3.a structural adjustment policy that reshapes the
relationships between academics and students

24. Willetts, D. 2013. Robbins Revisited:
Bigger and Better Higher Education.
London: Social Market Foundation.
http://bit.ly/1mhl2By
Byrne, L. 2014. Robbins Rebooted: How
We Earn Our Way in the Second Machine
Age. London: Social Market Foundation.
http://bit.ly/1q7P8OF
Rizvi, S., Donnelly, T., and Barber, M.
2013. An avalanche is coming: Higher
education and the revolution ahead.
IPPR. http://bit.ly/1jA5Dzo

25. Across the higher education system, institutions are using
technology in innovative ways.
Yet conventional universities no longer hold all the cards on
how the higher education market develops.
Although MOOCs are still at a relatively early stage, they are
evolving fast and may have the potential to tackle some
particular challenges – such as an apparent mismatch between
the supply and demand for high-level computer skills.
Willetts, D. 2013. Robbins Revisited: Bigger and Better Higher Education. London:
Social Market Foundation, p. 69. http://bit.ly/1mhl2By

26. we need a higher education system that helps to build better
jobs and equips people with the skills for high skilled, high
value-added, non-routine jobs.
It reminded me of something blunter that Paul Hofheinz,
President of the Lisbon Council said to me...: “if we want to
live better than others, then we will have to be better than
others.”
So our goal is bold and simple: to build a bigger knowledge
economy
Byrne, L. 2014. Robbins Rebooted: How We Earn Our Way in the Second
Machine Age. London: Social Market Foundation, pp. 27, 29.

27. open data: accountability and predictive
consumerism
money: efficiency and the student experience
competition: new providers and innovation,
entrepreneurialism and cost-efficiency
IPPR. 2013. Securing the future of higher education. http://bit.ly/19fiLpt

29. Lord Young, adviser to the Prime Minister on small
business and enterprise: http://bit.ly/1l5iY3Z

32. The Coalition government has quietly put in place a series of
measures designed to support a new performance metric: repayment
of loans by course and institution. It could become the one metric to
dominate all others and will be theorised under the rubric of ‘human
capital investment’.
The Small Business, Enterprise and Employability Act received Royal
Assent at the end of March 2015. Section Six of the bill is titled
‘Education Evaluation’…:
[The measures] will also help to create an incentive and reward
structure at universities by distinguishing the universities that
are delivering the strongest enterprise ethos and labour market
outcomes for their students.
McGettigan, A. 2015. The Treasury View of HE: variable human capital investment.
Political Economy Research Centre.

33. At Pearson, when we ask ourselves how we can help to achieve
that goal of doubling the amount of really high value learning, we
think about four things:
being more global; being more mobile; thinking holistically; being
absolutely obsessed with learning outcomes
“building an ever-wider range of bigger and more complex
standalone products and services to participating in more open,
interoperable educational ‘ecosystems’, centered around learners”
Pearson’s Five Trillion Dollar Question: http://bit.ly/1iaRaMp

36. Transnational
associations of capitals
Major Players in the
MOOC Universe.
Chronicle of HE.
http://bit.ly/1a2lqVv

37. Bain and Company (2012, http://bit.ly/11h3YsD):
• seize opportunities to use exportable services to increase
revenues and profits [MOOCs]
• upgrade low-tech products into premium consumer goods and
services [curriculum; learning analytics]
• services bound by physical geography made portable [mobile]
• leading universities in the advanced economies can
accelerate the training of home-grown specialists in emerging
economies
• by importing the talent of highly-skilled professionals from
companies in developed markets, businesses in the emerging
markets will not need to wait a generation for their own
education systems to produce a skilled workforce

38. Educational innovations sold to higher education as
personalisation, or retention, or employability, or whatever:
•in response to the development of a world market;
•making previously marginal sectors of the economy explicitly
productive;
•as a way of leveraging the ratio of the total surplus-value
produced in society to the total capital invested; and
•as a revolutionising of the means of production.

39. it is impossible to understand the role of the
University without developing a critique of its
relationships to a transnational capitalist class
pace Robinson, W.I. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and
State in a Transnational World. Johns Hopkins UP.

40. a note on educational innovation and the
colonisation of the soul

42. I know I have to come right out and say it, because very few
people in education technology will: there is a problem with
computers.
Culturally. Ideologically. There's a problem with the Internet.
Largely designed by men from the developed world, it is built
for men of the developed world. Men of science. Men of
industry. Military men. Venture capitalists.
Despite all the hype and hope about revolution and access and
opportunity that these new technologies will provide us, they do
not negate hierarchy, history, privilege, power. They reflect
those. They channel it. They concentrate it, in new ways and in
old.
Watters, A. 2015. Men Still Explain.

44. 1. Educational innovation = social forces in struggle + need to
overcome temporal/spatial barriers to accumulation
2. Secular control: the power of transnational capitalism over the
objective, material reality of life = reinforced technologically and
pedagogically
3. To argue for emancipation through educational innovation is to
fetishise technology and to ignore the relations of production

45. educational innovation and
our social forces of production

46. the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of
the general productive forces of the social brain,
is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to
labour, and hence appears as an attribute of
capital, and more specifically of fixed capital
[machinery].
Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse. London: Penguin.

47. As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised concept of the
knowledge society and engage in teaching, learning and
research only in so far as we can re-appropriate the
knowledge that has been stolen from the workers that have
produced this way of knowing (i.e. Abundance).
In the society of abundance the university as an institutional
form is dissolved, and becomes a social form or knowledge at
the level of society (i.e. The General Intellect).
It is only on this basis that we can knowingly address the
global emergencies with which we are all confronted.
The University of Utopia. 2015. Anti-Curriculum: A course of action. http://bit.ly/1qgEq8C

48. the possibility of struggle and emancipation lies in the
autonomous organisations that exist within and between both
the factory and the community
with a focus on the forms of labour and the exertion of “working
class power… at the level of the social factory, politically
recomposing the division between factory and community.”
Cleaver, H. 1979. Reading Capital Politically, University of Texas Press: Austin,
TX, p. 161. http://bit.ly/Y3w2Pf

49. Collective work is one of the cements of autonomy, whose
fruits usually spill into hospitals, clinics, primary and
secondary education, in strengthening the municipalities
and the good government juntas.
Not much that has been constructed would be possible
without the collective work, of men, women, boys, girls and
the elderly.
Zibechi, R. 2013. Autonomous Zapatista Education: The Little Schools of
Below. http://bit.ly/19XfrAF

50. inside

51. outside

52. inside and outside

53. • academics and activists
• a network of learning groups designed to promote political-
economic literacy
• democratise discussion over how and why our society is
organised, and what can be done
• to cultivate critical political economic literacy
• concrete social action
• all knowledge is co-produced
• no teachers or students: self-critical scholarly communities
• open, critical dialogue is foundational
• all feel entitled and able to teach
• all feel safe, respected, and supported

54. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present
pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of
labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and
beneficent system of the association of free and equal
producers.
We recommend to the working men to embark in co-
operative production rather than in co-operative stores. The
latter touch but the surface of the present economical
system, the former attacks its groundwork.
Marx, K. 1866. Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council:
The Different Questions. The International Workingmen's Association.

55. Is it possible to innovate against the rule of money?
What does this mean for the governance, funding and regulation
of both universities and the curriculum?
Is it possible to define a framework for the common ownership of
educational products, assets and commodities?
Might the democratic governance of the curriculum be a
transitional moment in the process of articulating alternatives?
Are open education, peer-to-peer education, copyfarleft, the
global educational commons and critical pedagogy points of
departure?

56. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who also believe that our work
is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth
of our students.
To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is
essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most
deeply and intimately begin.
bell hooks. 1994. Teaching to Transgress, p. 13.

57. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.