While we work to publish blog posts written by members of the community more regularly, we write or repost our own work as facilitators. Re-published below is an essay written by Laura Czerniewicz for the London School of Economics and Political Science blog. The article was published under a Creative Common License, and it is shared here with the author's permission. It is absolutely worth reading, especially for solutions that Laura offers to the problem of inequitable power dynamics of global knowledge production. -Current blog facilitator, Shyam

Showing “The World of Science”, the map below portrays global research production as expressed through science journals’ publishing in the early 2000s. It makes a dramatic point about the complexities of global inequalities in knowledge production and exchange. What would it take to redraw the knowledge production map to realise a vision of a more equitable and accurate world of knowledge?

Disparities

Knowledge creation and dissemination are, of course, crucially shaped by the practicalities of money and technology.  It is significant that the average R& D intensity (R&D as a percentage of GDP) for OECD countries was 2.4% in 2009, while few developing countries had reached 1% (Mjwara et al 2013). These percentages of national funds are important differentiators in what is possible; without comparable levels of support researchers in resource-poor environments must spend inordinate amounts of time fundraising and dealing with external grant-giving organisations, are limited in their ability to participate in scholarly community activities, and so are often constrained in the research they can undertake. Infrastructure also shapes what is possible; for example maps of internet cable clearly show how collaboration between those in the global north is enabled by substantial bandwidth while north-south and south-south connections are not. Continue reading Repost: Inequitable Power, Knowledge →

by EdConteXts Facilitators*

Emerging academic technologies and how they allow learning and teaching across borders are all the rage. Strangely, discourses about such phenomena as open online learning/teaching usually ignore the fundamental fact that those phenomena are cross-border, cross-context, cross-cultural. It is not just the hype in the media and the grand and often false promises in the marketing of emerging modes of cross-border education that disregard the complexity of cross-border education. Even the most informed educators (in their own contexts) seem to often forget that the many different contexts from which participants and stakeholders come are not just different from each other but also diverse from within, that contextual differences and complexities need to temper our ambitions, that effective teaching and learning cannot be defined in universal terms.

In response, an increasing number of educators, scholars/writers, and other stakeholders of emerging academic technologies and pedagogies around the world are contributing their experiences, ideas, and perspectives from the ground up. Within a short period of time, the conversation that was once dominated by one-way traffic of ideas–as by the idea of education as a supply of “content”–from the few global centers to the rest of the world is quickly becoming multilateral, diverse, and rich as it spreads across the social media. The network of scholars that we are looking to create will hopefully bring together the voices of scholars, practitioners, and other stakeholders of emerging academic technologies and pedagogies from across the world. Our objective is to make visible to broader audiences what we have been writing, researching, and working on–and what we will continue to do. Continue reading Bring Your Own Context: Where We Are Matters →