I’m looking forward to connecting with international educators in the coming days as part of my work with UNICollaboration. As an open educator I really value these opportunities for collaboration and mutual interaction and, given the current sh*tshow unravelling in the USA and around the world I think it is more important than ever to keep community alive and hopeful.

Many years ago, on the platform known as Twitter, I was accused by a then govt. tzar in education of being a progressive. Surely progress is a constrant aim for educators (and anyone!). Why would you want to go backwards? Seems I was naive, some really want the bad old days back – usually for their own personal gain. Hang the rest of us. Seems Trump has regrets over decisions made after WW2, as he mused during his rambling, incoherent speech at Davos recently.

I remain an unremitting progressive, I am also “woke” and proudly so. Moving forwards with your eyes closed is a recipe for disaster. A newspaper interview today with Martha Lane Fox reveals just how important the “eyes open” part of that is. Still battling pain from her accident after two years in hospital she shares her expretise to warn about the state of the tech industry and the influence of the broligarchs She says:

“When you look at the people running the biggest technology businesses in the world, they are mainly men. They come from one small bit of the world in the US and another small bit of the world in China. It means that we’re not getting a broad spectrum of considered, careful products.”

She goes on to talk of online misogyny, male anger and the influence of such powerful tech bros in the USA. By default of course that influence is worldwide too. A recent video shared by a woman filming ICE about their disgusting violence captures the man mocking her as he says “we have a nice little database”. Chilling.

I am perhaps a little less optimistic than Martha. I struggled recently to choose to upgrade my 10 year old laptop for fear of feeding the AI beast. I feel conflicted about an industry run by careless, power hungry and unpleasant individuals. However at least I can work on a human level, albeit tech mediated, to speak up for a better world. The article ends with this Martin Luther King quotation: