Online Educa Debate

This year, on Thursday December 1st, we were discussing the effect of new technology on freedom and the potential consequences for education. The motion was:

‘This house expresses its concern about the effect developments in technology are increasingly having on personal liberty and believes this will have serious consequences for learning in the future.’

Conference participants were invited by the chair, former British parliamentarian Harold Elletson, to air their views and, at the end of the debate, to take a vote.

There has been increasing discussion surrounding the freedom which new technological communication devices and methods can provide. For example, in the case of learning, mobile technologies and social networks can promote a widening in participation in education for those who may otherwise have been excluded and there has been a prominent increase in the use of these learning methods in recent years, notably in developing countries. However, there appears to be a downside to this so called ‘freedom’. With every interaction learners make with these technologies, more and more personal data is captured and user habits tracked. The major providers of these tools are storing and building personal data profiles and basic civil liberty rights and privacy are increasingly being compromised. Providers have the possibility to sell profiles to prospective interested third parties, such as employers, and even open source providers have an interest in data profiling, as they too can sell on the personal data collected. Further development of these technologies may end up being inhibited or halted if these liberty issues are not solved.