Teach-In Against Surveillance

As you may be aware, Ian Linkletter is being sued by Proctorio for sharing their support materials on Twitter. Details of the action are available here: https://defend.linkletter.org

As a community of educational technologists, students, faculty, and other interested parties, it’s important that we take a public stand against this chilling legal action. But it’s equally important to recognize that these issues go beyond this one company and extend to a perspective on education — that students must be surveilled — that harms the very mission of education itself.

Suggested donation for those able is $20, but please pay what you comfortably can. Everyone is welcome, at any (or no) donation level. Any donations raised over and above Ian’s legal expenses will be donated to the BCCLA. Instructors are encouraged to bring their students to the event at no additional cost in order to learn more about theses issues. Students will be given priority in the question and answer period following each talk.

Join us to hear five speakers talk about surveillance, educational technologies, academic freedom, student care, and more.

Maha Bali is Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She has a PhD in Education from the University of Sheffield, UK. She is co-founder of virtuallyconnecting.org (a grassroots movement that challenges academic gatekeeping at conferences) and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound (an equity-focused, open, connected intercultural learning curriculum, which has also branched into academic community activities Continuity with Care and Socially Just Academia). She writes and speaks frequently about social justice, critical pedagogy, and open and online education. She blogs regularly at http://blog.mahabali.me and tweets @bali_maha

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. He is also the author HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about conspiracies and monopolies; and of RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE; and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER. His first picture book was POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER (Aug 2020). He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

sava saheli singh is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa. Previously, as a postdoc at the Surveillance Studies Centre (SSC) at Queen’s University, she conceptualized, co-created, and co-produced “Screening Surveillance”—a knowledge translation program for the Big Data Surveillance project. “Screening Surveillance” is three short near-future fiction films that call attention to the potential human consequences of big data surveillance. Specifically, this project extends existing research from the SSC to examine the intersections and implications of big data systems, risk, and surveillance. Previously, sava completed her PhD on Academic Twitter from New York University’s Educational Communication and Technology program. Her research interests include educational surveillance; digital labour and surveillance capitalism; and critically examining the effects of technology and techno-utopianism on society.

Jesse Stommel is co-founder of Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy: the journal of critical digital pedagogy. He has a PhD from University of Colorado Boulder. He is co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Jesse is a documentary filmmaker and teaches courses about pedagogy, film, and new media. Jesse experiments relentlessly with learning interfaces, both digital and analog, and his research focuses on higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, and assessment. He’s got a rascal pup, Emily, two clever cats, Loki and Odin, and a badass daughter, Hazel. He’s online at jessestommel.com and on Twitter @Jessifer.

Audrey Watters is a writer who focuses on education technology — the relationship between politics, pedagogy, business, culture, and ed-tech. She has worked in the education field for over 15 years: teaching, researching, organizing, and project-managing. Although she was two chapters into her dissertation (on a topic completely unrelated to ed-tech), she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test: freelance writer. Audrey has written for The Atlantic, Edutopia, MindShift, Inside Higher Ed, The School Library Journal, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere across the Web, in addition to her own blog Hack Education.