Gliberals

What is it with liberals?

I know that's an overbroad question which a body can answer in a thousand contradictory ways and still be right, but...

...specifically, what's wrong with the liberal type, that in promoting a new project or savethechildreny venture, they so often glom onto corporate speak?

"...Software is moving to the cloud and so is school. Cloud-based computing makes applications available anywhere, anytime, across multiple devices. Software-as-a-service allows us to tailor what we use and how much we buy -- take your pick of five versions of Turbo Tax depending on your needs; build your own playlist of music; build your own virtual desktop with your favorite browser, email client, and applications.

I wrote about this last week too and it wasn't a very popular idea with some readers. I still think School-as-a-Service (SaaS) is an important metaphor for the future of customized learning and am certain that it will work better for students and teachers. We ask teachers to differentiate learning and then give them big classes. The shift to personal digital learning will soon customize learning as much as the rest of our lives. 

Here are 10 dimensions of School-as-a-Service:

1. SaaS has a digital backbone rather than print backbone; it's a unique student identifier more than a book bag; it's an IP address more than a seat on a chart. 

2. SaaS is student-centered rather than teacher centered; learning is customized for every student -- a playlist/project-list of their own -- rather than experiencing whole group age-cohort instruction (large group experiences and seminars may be part of SaaS but they aren't predominant). 

3. SaaS is competency-based rather than time based; progress is marked in small and flexible chunks (e.g., merit badges) measured by multiple assessments many of which are embedded within the learning experiences. 

4. SaaS is dynamic scheduling rather than master scheduling; there is a new and flexible day schedule every day rather than a 90 day course schedule.

5. SaaS has a free or inexpensive foundation of open instructional experiences but can be enriched with premium games, simulations, and other curated collections and sequences. The same can be said for tools -- a foundation of pretty good open tools augmented by premium applications -- all purchased and downloaded and customized online. 

6. SaaS is team based staffing with some local and some remote staff. About the time the bureaucrats are about ready to nail down new value-added evaluation systems based on annual standardized assessments, differentiated/distributed staffing and progress based on performance makes much of that obsolete.

7. SaaS isn't bound by a place but it may be take up temporary residence ranging from a day a week check-in to extended day/year with full wrap around services. 

8. SaaS isn't going to get too hung up on a particular access strategy because it is mobile and works across multiple devices. Many students will look at least three screens during day: a big screen, a mobile screen, and a screen linked to a full keyboard. 

9. SaaS works best with weighted funding with a portable wallet that facilitates acquisition of specialty services (e.g., speech therapy, reading specialist, math tutoring). 

10. SaaS is best situated in case management services for guidance, transcript management, integration and application opportunities, connection to community services, and extracurricular activities...

Or:

"The RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT ("RtoP" or "R2P") is a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community’s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

INTERNATIONAL COALITION FOR THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT(ICRtoP) brings together NGOs from all regions of the world to strengthen normative consensus for RtoP, further the understanding of the norm, push for strengthened capacities to prevent and halt genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and mobilize NGOs to push for action to save lives in RtoP country-specific situations."

SaaS. R2P.

Fucking NAFTA.

Why is it that when a liberal wants to sell the hoi polloi on a policy or program which will almost certainly fuck up their kids and make a bunch of self-satisfied liberals gobs o' money, he or she glibs up the language with acronymic junk?*

Is it that these liberals are constitutionally incapable of admitting that they're as predatory and uberclass in their motives as their more forthright conservative competitors? Is this an attempt to distance themselves with words? Do they believe this pap?

Or is that almost every liberal you're going to meet is a product of a corporatist, Hamiltonian, managerial meritocracy? Is it that they really don't know better?

I personally have little use for traditionalists and conservatives, or for the various schools of Hegelian economic hermeticism, but from time to time I get of whiff of embarrassment from those quarters. It positively wafts upward and out, unconstrained and uncontainable. It's like they're capable of coming to the realization that they're fiddling with words about words in a sad, self belittling effort to come to terms with impotence and the meanness of existence, with the failure of history to comply with physics, and worse yet, to conform to their alchemies of synthesis and antithesis - and have enough capacity for shame to blush in public.

But technocratic liberals?

There's no fucking hope for them. And I intend that play on words...




* - the Saas guy actually gets worse, as the article continues:

"...I've written frequently about emerging learning platform ecosystems: digital content libraries on a widget rich social layer with a smart recommendation engine and aligned student, teacher, and school services. SaaS is really an extension of a next gen platform. The metaphor attempts to move a step further from teacher- and print-centric, classroom-based learning to a set of customized learning services that are flexible in time and location.

The big state and national online learning providers are SaaS -- at least a first gen version featuring mostly flat and sequential content and bounded by a set of restrictive policies.

Choice to the course, as just enacted in Utah by SB65, is a step in this direction. But SaaS will take some energy and investment by lead providers (i.e., the folks that take student outcome 
responsibility and manage the transcript) to stitch together into a coherent service offering. Most providers (including school districts, charter school networks, and state virtual schools) will want to join an ecosystem rather than attempting to build their own. Broadband providers will need to be part of the solution by ensuring affordable access to every home..." 

I think I've translated it properly, as:  "We've got profitable software which you will have to license or lease, and which is managed by mega-corporations on proprietary servers, and we're going to extract oodles of rent from strapped municipalities and schools with it, but whoa dude, that's like wicked gauche to say in public..."