Capitalism doesn’t create power imbalances – it erodes them. Tyranny has been there for a very long time. The default state of human society is ignorance, poverty, tyranny, and disease, but the history of capitalist countries is the history of ever greater freedom, improved living quality, medicine, technology, and erm, democracy (amongst other things). They capitalist democracies are not perfect, but they do not explain the origins of power imbalances. Capitalism would help places like Africa immensely, both from a pwoer perspective and from that of alleviating misery. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

When an Economic Crisis Hits eLearning, What Do Managers Have to Say About It?

OK, first things first, we as a community have to learn not to preface everything with the phrase “In these troubled economic times…” or some such mantra. Not only is it the sort of thing where hearing it over and over makes it true, it is the sort of thing that is not helpful, because the economy has not changed materially since before the crash. This is important to understand, because what it suggests is that the loss of wealth was of wealth that did not exist in the first place – it was largely fictitious wealth created by (shyster) credit markets. Real harm will be caused, though, if we act as though nothing is of value any more. We need to, for now, continue creating, selling, producing and consuming. But we also need to retool, because our economic patterns are not sustainable. The only way out of this is to replace, in relatively short order, fictitious value with real value. We don’t do that by pulling in the reins, managing conservatively, being ‘fiscally prudent’. GM cannot save its way out of bankruptcy; Nortel cannot improve its $0.00 stock valuation by cutting back. We can, all of us, build an environmentally responsible, socially just, and progressive market economy based on fairness and humanity. Real value, produced by real people. To proceed in any other direction will most certainly unleash substantial and needless misery throughout what will have formerly been called “the developed world”.

«You make mistakes you die.» Indeed, and we see this with the financial crisis don’t we? The current generation of authoritarian-educated decision-makers (including Wladawsky), with all their greed, lacks the capacity to deal with the crisis they have stirred up themselves; lacks the complexity and the integrity to do anything substantial about it.

I agree with your call for educationalists and educational technologists to take on a stronger political role, but alongside should be a call to all activists fighting for economic, social and political change to take a stance on education – we may have ignored it, but education has never been apolitical.