Welcome to Constant Etherpad!

These pads are archived each night (around 4AM CET) @ http://etherdump.constantvzw.org/
An RSS feed from the etherdump also appears on http://constantvzw.org/

To prevent your public pad from appearing in the archive and RSS feed, put or just leave the following (including the surrounding double underscores) anywhere in the text of your pad:

    __NOPUBLISH__

Changes will be reflected after the next update at 4AM.

SUE -> See at the bottom of this page for the start of our reader

Sue Ferge is the result of the political commitment of a group activists, a rtists and academics which, step by step during the last 48 hours, built a space using common tools. Sue animates and embodies the transformation of higher education on the basis of common key values – such as freedom of expression, autonomy for institutions, independent students unions, academic freedom, free movement of students and staff. Through this process Sue is continuously transforming these higher education systems based on a contributory value regime grounded in the principles and practices of reciprocity, mutualism and transnationalism.


- VAT number (via http://www.freedomcoop.eu  
- collective email address (bot + list)
- open academic profile page (E2H: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1owl6D17iXudLX1D0X_wTx26tWhkQZtAYF9pW6674OPk/edit)
- GITHUB account 
- Publishes a reader on self-organisation and education 
- is lecturing.

HACKING BOLOGNA (Critical clouds)
27-28-29 April 2017 | BUDA | Kortrijk (BE)

http://www.budakortrijk.be/en/news/whats-the-matter-with-school-open-call

During the Hacking Bologna session experts are invited to speculate on the creation of an autonomous cooperative school. The school is conceived as post-academic and post-artistic education. The Hacking Bologna work session is initiated by Critical clouds, an independent research initiative aimed at reactivating the radical potential of higher education in the arts.

Bram Crevits, Pascal Desimpelaere, Michel Bauwens, Mike Neary, Hala Elias Poles, Thomas Storme, Laurence Rassel, Sue Ferge, Clara Vankerschaver

Bologna decrree 'placeholder tex't:
The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is the result of the political will of 48 countries which, step by step during the last eighteen years, built an area using common tools. These 48 countries implement reforms on higher education on the basis of common key values – such as freedom of expression, autonomy for institutions, independent students unions, academic freedom, free movement of students and staff. Through this process, countries, institutions and stakeholders of the European area continuously adapt their higher education systems making them more compatible and strengthening their quality assurance mechanisms. For all these countries, the main goal is to increase staff and students’ mobility and to facilitate employability.
This official website of EHEA provides both general information on this process and detailed information for experts.

Sue Ferge is the result of the political commitment of a group activists, activists and academics which, step by step during the last 48 hours, built a space using common tools. Sue animates and embodies the transformation of higher education on the basis of common key values – such as freedom of expression, autonomy for institutions, independent students unions, academic freedom, free movement of students and staff. Through this process Sue is continuously transforming these higher education systems based on a contributory value regime grounded in the principles and practices of reciprocity, mutualism and transnationalism.




The Wiki with syllabus:
    http://www.criticalclouds.be/opendesign/wiki/doku.php
    
    
Michel Bauwens on value and the commons: (transcription talk Athens)
    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KQKQF6wkoONihafpuKJMCvJkMeS_NThQzaGQPa6y4io/edit?usp=sharing
    
Model for her academic bio: :-)
    http://www.davidstillwell.co.uk/

De Hacking Bologna werksessie stelt zich tot doel om tijdens een driedaagse gesloten werksessie op zoek te gaan naar een werkbare, formele organisatiestructuur voor een opleidingsinitiatief (opleiding, departement of school) waarin maximale 'institutionele autonomie’ wordt bereikt, en waar tegelijk zoveel mogelijk wordt gebruikgemaakt van de voordelen van het Bologna akkoord en de implementatie ervan in het Vlaamse decreet Hoger Onderwijs.

Concreet mikt de werkgroep erop om te speculeren rond de creatie van een autonoom initiatief voor hoger onderwijs – al dan niet (deels) verbonden aan een bestaand instituut als ‘parallel school’ – waarbij studenten en docenten juridisch eigenaar zijn van hun instelling (multi-stakeholders coöperatieve structuur), maar waarbij tegelijk gemikt wordt op het optimaal verwerven van de rechten en voordelen verbonden aan conventionele institutionele werkvormen (beurssystemen, credits-verwerving,...).

De werkgroep verenigt hiervoor zowel Vlaamse als internationale onderwijs- en organisatie-experts.

Deze bijeenkomst werd geïnitieerd door ‘Critical Common clouds’; een autonome onderzoeksgroep die initiatieven opzet rond het herdenken van hoger kunstonderwijs. Meer specifiek mikt Critical Common clouds op het herdenken van hoger kunstonderwijs tot een post-academische vorm. Met de term ‘post-academisch’ wordt de academisering van het hoger kunstonderwijs in vraag gesteld, en wordt een heractiveren van het productieve, creatieve en experimentele potentieel van hoger onderwijs tout court vooropgesteld. Critical Common clouds speculeert daarop door het opzetten van werkvormen waarbij de kritische en radicale aspecten van praktijk-gebaseerd en reflectief onderwijs – zoals beoefend in hoger kunstonderwijs – toegankelijk gesteld worden voor deelnemers zonder artistieke achtergrond of ambitie. 

Deelnemers sessie: Bram Crevits (KASK/School of Arts Gent; founder Critical clouds) Pascal Desimpelaere (Hoofd Dienst Studentenaangelegenheden, School of Arts Gent), Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation), Mike Neary (Lincoln University, Social Science Centre Lincoln), Hala Elias (Hackerspace Gent, Intercommunale Kortrijk), Thomas Storme (Lab for Education and Society, KU Leuven), Laurence Rassel (Directrice, Ecole de Recherche Graphique, Brussel), Sue Ferge (Common clouds, Brussel), Clara Vankerschaver (PhD Researcher, participatory designer; Critical clouds), Natalia Avlona (Lawyer, Commons)



Codex Hoger Onderwijs:
http://www.hogeronderwijsregister.be/files/537ee8ffcd036_Codex%20Hoger%20Onderwijs.pdf
 
Structuurdecreet (opgeheven en nu omvat in de codex hoger onderwijs):
http://data-onderwijs.vlaanderen.be/edulex/document.aspx?docid=13425
 
Flexibiliseringsdecreet (opgeheven en nu omvat in de codex hoger onderwijs):
http://data-onderwijs.vlaanderen.be/edulex/document.aspx?docid=13528
 
Bologna-akkoord
http://www.ehea.info/

Common clouds
http://www.criticalclouds.be

https://github.com/greyscalepress/manifestos

Participatory action research
Militant ethnography
Speculative peer-production
Social science fiction
Critical pedagogy

Booksprint
Hackaton
A commons


email-address (automated)
profile page
facebook page
wiki (repository)
twitter

toolkit: 
    
    


1. Issuing an invoice / being hired as a guest speaker
2. She is a legal person? 
3. can we see her identity as a commons?

Questions:
    What is the identity of the academic made explicit in the Bologna process?
    Can we hack this identity? Can we nurture Sue Ferges as a " perfect academic" on the outside, following and adapting to the contemporary european space of higher education; whilst developing and maintaining a collective model of research and teaching on the inside?


PUBLISHING:

My process for publishing on amazon is the following:

- Get an account on Amazon Createspace.
- Create publication, upload PDF for interior and cover files (in the case of the Manifestos, the interior is generated with Pandoc, the cover is made with Scribus).
- Wait 24 hours until the files are approved.
- Validate the result - a few hours later, books are available to be ordered and printed.

Whenever I make an update, I do the following:

- Generate new PDF
- Generate new cover, since the spine width varies according to page count (I made myself a little tool for the calculation: < https://github.com/greyscalepress/interview-project/blob/master/notes/spine-calculator.html >
- In CreateSpace, replace the interior and cover files. - Wait again for approval (during that time, the book will be unavailable for ordering).  A decision to make when publishing revisions, is if you want (A) to replace the previous version (as explained above), or (B) create a new publication - that's what I did with revision 0.8 of the Manifestos, as there were big changes, and I wanted the previous version to co-exist.  As you see, it's a simple manual process.  If you want to setup an entirely automated workflow between Github and Amazon, the thing Michael Mandiberg did it with Print Wikipedia would be the way to go: http://www.mandiberg.com/print-wikipedia/   Cheers, Manuel   

EMAILING

Dag Bram,

Hierbij een versie van de mailbot. De code is niet al te ingewikkeld, je moet wel een aantal libraries downloaden. Kijk hiervoor naar eerste lijnen code die beginnen met import, from..., etc. (bv. nltk, markovify, ...) Het programma zelf is in Python 2.7

HIER
 
EMAIL_ACCOUNT = "public.ditto@gmail.com"
PASSWORD = ask bram
 kan je Sue Ferges gmail gegevens invoeren ipv bovenstaande "public.ditto@gmail.com"...
 

Wanneer je het programma runt dan vraagt hij naar een keuze , gewoon op Sue Ferge drukken of enter. 

De rest kunnen we na mijn deadline aanpassen.

Succes,
Jerry


What is there to hack in the Bologna Agreement?

On June 19th 1999 the Bologna declaration was signed as a joint declaration of the European Ministers of Education. Since then no less then 48 countries have join ed the declaration and several ministrial conferences were organized to evaluate the progress and process.

If we make a roundup, t he agreement itself points out a short list of priorities in the objective to establish and strengthen the European system of higher education worldwide:
    
http://www.magna-charta.org/resources/files/BOLOGNA_DECLARATION.pdf

-          Adaption of a system with easy readable and comparable degrees throughout Europe.
-          Organizing the higher education system in a two-cycli-structure, the bachelor-master structure (BaMa) .
-          Establishing a system of credits; which should not necessarily be acquired in a higher education context.
-          Promotion of mobility and free movement within higher education
-          Promotion of co-operation in quality assurance
-          Promotion of inter-institutional cooperation

So far so good. Indeed, coming up with these objectives seems justifiable. However it is interesting to look at what happened with the agreement on the level of each of the members. V ague as the agreement is (it is actually only a declaration of intent), much had to interpreted, concretized and translated in each country separately. And exactly this has complicated and impeded the original intentions and objectives. 
Throughout the 48 participating members we see/saw a huge inflation of regulations and laws trying to implement the objectives. In a lot of specific situations regulations between countries didn’’t match. One could say that this contradictory overregulation of higher education ruins the initial objectives. However, as we will point out later, this could create also extra chances. Let us first take a look at some of the specific dynamics within the countries itself:

1. In the post-world-war-II-period, government s lost in a certain way their grip on education. Especially during the sixties and the seventies when new ways of thinking about education raised from bottom-up (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school_movement) . In the necessary translation and adaption of the Bologna agreement, which each country had to make, politics and government saw an opportunity to claim back higher education and strengthen their control. In transforming the agreement into laws and regulations and implement them nationwide, higher education systems became less autonomous, which is actually contradictory to the intentions of the agreement. Over t he past two decades , the politic al level was able to take crucial decisions in terms of content within higher education: they, and not the students and/or teachers and/or institutions decided what a bachelor or masterprogram actually should be.


A) Attempt Politic and goverment to take over higher education; less autonomy for : decisi o ns on content (what is a bachelor, which study programs can be offered, what is the duration,…), financing, institutes organize themselves, what is quality assurance,…)

B) Selfprotection: who’s a player in higher education and who’s not; who can get finances and who not.  Big difference cultural and also economic sector: organized more liberal.  More easy to become a player in the field. -

C) Uniformize within the country and not across borders – http://items.ssrc.org/reflections-on-the-rise-of-educational-nationalism/

D) “Optimalize” the financial support by the government constructions – how we can control financial support and when necessary decrease financial upport.  How we can save money form hgeher education.  Result-oriented financing.

Effects:
-          Bureaucratisation within higher education; to deal with all this regulations.
-          Unformisation & result-oriented financing that leads to competition between . The “education market” within the country.  The struggle for the student (finances that go to communication, quality control, administation… increase increase,…) in disfavor of the mony that goes to the student and the teacher.  This competion and uniformalisation,: leads to merging of institutions, monopolization (comparable with economic sectors where free market leads t monopolization) : Danger: School of Arts: in a few years in Flanders maybe just 2 School of Arts.
-          Oragnizing Inequality:
o   Institutions and their possibilities and their flexibility (European level)
o   Students – what is a degree worth (NARIC / NUFFIC) / What does a study cost… Disadvantages in studying abroad as a regular student.  Less choices ue to monopilasation.
E.g. Organizing a postacademic course in an autonomous context that profits from the regulations and financing: almost impossible.  
 
Hacking the bologna agreement:
- Using the differences in Europe.
- Using the existing structur e
 
There are more or less 2 options:
    
1.       Creating y our own institution:
a.       Where we have to do that?
b.       Can we deal with all the elements in the context (infrastructure, loans for personnel, organization  of it, accountability,…etc.) 
-          Situation Mike
-          “How can we steal?”
-          School is just a step in a transition.  Make & destroy
-          Dissemination?
-          Risk that our principes and point of view slowly fades away during this process
 
 
2.       How we can make a cuckoo’s egg.  A module, a programma a school,… that occulates on institutions.
a.       Where’s the attraction for this instutions.  Why they would agree.  How we can match what we want with the “education market”.
b.       Very mobile, not country or site bounded.  The neceesarity to move due to get not infected by a certain instituation, reguation our country. Should be on several places at the same time.  Actually this could be a next step that lies in a certain way in the spirit of the blogna agreement.  So it’s not hacking BA but a further working through BA
c.       On wich level: an institution, faulty, study program à flexibility.  
Besides the content, 4 important questions
1.       Cooperative school can get easily affected by the context, the regulations / How we can turn it the other way around: how can our cuckoocks egg affect the institution where it’s in.  How it can disseminate within the intuition.  A good answer on this point can be the reason why institutions are willing to take care over the egg. 
2.       Structure and organize it.  Probably also here – it should be on a dynamic level
3.       Quality Assurance, control and accountability: own à Bram other ways.
4.       Guarantee Equality students (nationality, level on earning credits, admission conditions, finances and tuition fees, degree)


////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


Book Title Hacking Bologna


On first page of inside cover:

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is the result of the political will of 48 countries which, step by step during the last eighteen years, built an area using common tools. These 48 countries implement reforms on higher education on the basis of common key values – such as freedom of expression, autonomy for institutions, independent students unions, academic freedom, free movement of students and staff. Through this process, countries, institutions and stakeholders of the European area continuously adapt their higher education systems making them more compatible and strengthening their quality assurance mechanisms. For all these countries, the main goal is to increase staff and students’ mobility and to facilitate employability.


Preface

Sue Ferge is the result of the political commitment of a group activists, activists and academics which, step by step for two days at an workshop in Kortrijk, Belgium, built an academic space using common tools. Sue animates and embodies the transformation of higher education on the basis of common key values – freedom of expression, autonomy for institutions, independent students unions, academic freedom, free movement of students and staff, and being queer. Through this process Sue is continuously transforming these higher education systems based on a contributory value regime grounded in the principles and practices of reciprocity, mutualism and transnationalism. Sue is the detournement of the university.

Sue Ferge is not an academic, rather an academic form not yet fully made. With a legal, technological, bureaucratic, economic and political form. Sue is making herself. We are making Sue. We are Sue. Sue is a not-yet social institution that depends on the socialisation of society. Or knowledge at the level of society as a form of social knowing.

MN to add summary of Nicholas Thoburn - Anti-book, particularly chapter 4: What Matter Who's Speaking?: the politics of autonomous writing: 
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/anti-book