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<p class="MsoNormal">As we continue discussing how to do procurement better… <o:p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Marc Lentini | he.him.his<br>
Director of Educational Technology <br>
Highline College | <a href="mailto:mlentini@highline.edu" title="mailto:mlentini@highline.edu"><span style="color:#0563C1">mlentini@highline.edu</span></a> | (206) 592-3778<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt">==============</span></b><br>
<a href="https://ammienoot.com/brain-fluff/procurement-aka-the-crack-in-everything-that-lets-the-bullshit-in/">https://ammienoot.com/brain-fluff/procurement-aka-the-crack-in-everything-that-lets-the-bullshit-in/</a><o:p></o:p></p>
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<span style="font-size:25.5pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Procurement aka the crack in everything that lets the bullshit in<o:p></o:p></span></h1>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Written by
<a href="https://ammienoot.com/author/admin/"><span style="color:#416ED2">Anne-Marie Scott</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">July 22, 2022<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:18.0pt"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif"><img border="0" width="498" height="231" style="width:5.1875in;height:2.4062in" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://ammienoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sticking-duct-tape-to-a-huge-wall-crack-seth-rogen.gif" alt="A white man placing a piece of inadequate duct tape over a massive crack in a wall. This is a metaphor."><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">I’ve been thinking and writing and
<a href="https://ctli.jibc.ca/demofest/"><span style="color:#416ED2">talking</span></a> a lot about edtech procurement recently.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">In fact I’ve been thinking and
<a href="https://ammienoot.com/brain-fluff/mind-the-ethics-gap/"><span style="color:#416ED2">writing</span></a> and
<a href="https://apereo.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/JCON/pages/103482849/Spring+2010+Session+Facilitator+Assignment+Worksheet">
<span style="color:#416ED2">talking</span></a> about it for years but it feels like in this moment it might just be getting a little more traction. It might of course be because I’ve had the pleasure of thinking and writing and talking about it with
<a href="https://blog.brennaclarkegray.ca"><span style="color:#416ED2">Brenna Clarke Gray</span></a> who is very smart and eloquent. Or maybe it’s that the combined force of two women who will not be silent and sit down gets harder to ignore. Or maybe we just
wore out all the more interesting topics (*more* proctoring anyone?). In any case, here we are.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Today the procurement of educational technologies is fundamentally flawed both as a practice and a process.</span></strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Institutional processes such as procurement tend to be rather absent from conversations about digital education, often acknowledged as problematic
but also outside our sphere of influence or domain of expertise. So why do I think edtech procurement is a problem? and why should learning technologists and academics care? Why should universities care?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Here’s my short take on it, from my perspective as a time served learning technologist and now a senior administrator in a Canadian university.
I have longer things to say, and those will appear in time as book chapters, websites, presentations, and maybe papers, and hopefully they will continue to help me refine and clarify my thinking, along with any feedback folks feel kind enough to offer me (hint).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">I’ll start by framing up some problems with edtech today (not exhaustive!).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Edtech is big business.</span></strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif"> A lot of money rides on
the successful procurement of edtech and can drive institutional investment and adoption. This could be speculative market making activities by VC backed vendors (we’ve all seen the proctoring scaremongering) or it could be institutions hoping for increased
revenue through digital transformation programmes. <em><span style="font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">There are a variety of vested interests influencing the technologies we use.</span></em><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Edtech is not a tool.
</span></strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Pedagogy and technology are not mutually exclusive; they are entangled and mutually shaping. This is a fancy way of saying learning and teaching can be bent out of shape by
technology and we can bend technology out of shape for learning and teaching purposes. For good or bad outcomes.
<em><span style="font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">The technologies we use are matters of quality.
</span></em><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Edtech is not neutral.</span></strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif"> Never more so commercial
edtech which in the last 10 years especially seems to have at once embraced a de-humanised vision of learning at scale, combined with many of the logics of carceral tech. Lovely. Platforms can obscure off-shored precarious labour, or the owners of edtech companies
can behave in ways that stifle academic discourse and legitimate enquiry, or educational technologies embody racism and bias, or all of the above.
<em><span style="font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">The technologies we use are political.</span></em><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Edtech is killing us.</span></strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif"> The futures of edtech that
are being constantly sold to many of us increasingly stand in stark contrast to a planet in crisis. AI fuelled socio-technical imaginaries promise a future of more personalisation and efficiency. But it’s increasingly uncertain that there will even be a future,
and more technology may not the best option for ensuring there is. <em><span style="font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Our use of technologies needs to be sustainable.</span></em><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">All of the above being true (and I believe they are) then how we procure technology comes sharply into focus as it’s the main conduit through
which edtech finds it’s way into our institutions, and I think it is broken as a practice and a process because in my experience it fails to account for all of the above. So what should we do? I have some thoughts, and some questions, but this remains a work
in progress.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">The procurement of edtech fundamentally needs to be re-framed as issue of educational quality assurance since it has a material impact on digital education.</span></strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">
Re-framing it in this way will open up a number of questions about process including who is involved, how procurement strategy is determined, what is evaluated. It can also help recenter our thinking onto what matters most and cut through some of the vested
interests issues.<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;line-height:18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;max-width:100%">
<strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">We need to plug the ethics / standards gap in edtech procurement.</span></strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif"> We’ve done this already for
other kinds of procurement (buying fair-trade foods, excluding modern slavery from supply chains etc) so it’s clearly possible. There are
<a href="https://www.alt.ac.uk/news/media_releases/launching-alt%E2%80%99s-framework-ethical-learning-technology-felt">
<span style="color:#416ED2">frameworks already which can help</span></a>, and <a href="https://www.edds-education.org/post/edtech-procurement-matters-it-needs-a-coherent-solution-clear-governance-and-market-standards">
<span style="color:#416ED2">interesting ideas emerging, including the idea of licensing schemes</span></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;line-height:18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;max-width:100%">
<strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">We need to keep asking the fundamental question of whether we need to do as much of it as we do?</span></strong><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">
Is more edtech the answer? Or would we as institutions be better to investment in people and help to support the design of creative digital pedagogy in an environment of technical restraint?<o:p></o:p></span></li></ol>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Beyond all of the above, which to be honest seem like quite doable things right now if we have the will to do them, I think there’s a bigger issue
still lurking.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">All procurement activities are complex entanglements of the values, purposes, and contexts of multiple groups in the academy – students, teachers,
technology professionals – and we are all forced to distill all of this complexity into a set of functional and commercial requirements that can be scored and weighted. These can only ever be imperfect proxies for what we are really trying to evaluate. We
do this because public sector procurement processes are designed to be “transparent” and “fair” to ensure that there is competition between vendors and that we can be accountable for how public money was spent. The rationale for this is generally one of minimising
risk to institutions (being sued for anti-competitive behaviour, being penalised for poor management of public resources). However, based on my experiences over 20 years in the edtech space I think our procurement practices are introducing new risks by not
attending to the issues of quality, ethics, and sustainability (being sued by our students for harming them, being sued by edtech companies for being critical of them, or an inability to sustain in the face of a resource constrained future), and I have concerns
that the current processes for distilling complexity into a set of convenient proxies may not be adequate to the challenge.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="line-height:18.0pt;max-width:100%"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:"-apple-system-font",serif">Fundamentally, I think we are losing sight of the purpose of good education in these processes. How can we recenter that?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">------- <o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Marc Lentini<o:p></o:p></p>
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