Tag: week 2

Someone walking past run-down buildings and shops selling cheap goods. No job to go to and no purpose in life. This could be the picture of an everyday working class person almost anywhere in the world. However, it’s the life of a robot in a futuristic version of Brixton as depicted in the short movie Robots of Brixton.

Despite portraying a dystopian vision of the London district, the animation is beautifully detailed with a strong focus on architecture. Buildings are stacked on top of each other resembling a ghetto which is home to a disillusioned robot workforce. The robot we follow in the movie seems disheartened in the face of poverty, unemployment and drugs.

The film concludes with scenes of rebel robots being chased and attacked by police. However advanced technology, in this case robots, has become, social problems are still an issue. Social divides remain resulting in similar unrests to what human residents of Brixton experienced in the past. The words ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce’ appear in order to remind us of the riots in 1981.

Linking this thought back to education, we need to be mindful that technologies are not the answer to social inequalities. When looking at the uptake of MOOCs, for example, ‘MOOC students have very high levels of educational attainment… In addition to being highly educated, the Coursera student population tends to be young, male, and employed, with a majority from developed countries’ (Christensen et al., 2013: 4). Simply having the offering of free education does not mean that everyone can take advantage of it. Tawfik et al. (2016: 602) describe in their study that ‘while the discourse on the benefits of technology to curb inequality is laudable, technology-infused interventions may also have differential effects favoring already advantaged groups and serve to widen outcome gaps’.

Images from http://www.presidentsmedals.com/Entry-29391

References

Christensen, G., Steinmetz, A., Alcorn, B., Bennett, A., Woods, D., & Emanuel, E. J. (2013). The MOOC Phenomenon: Who Takes Massive Open Online Courses and Why? Social Science Research Network Journal.

Tawfik, A. A., Reeves, T. D. & Stich, A. (2016). Intended and Unintended Consequences of Educational Technology on Social Inequality. Tech Trends, 60:598–605.