2/13/14

Artistic Freedom and Online Learning

Time magazine is in agreement with many international news publications in suggesting that warrantless mass surveillance was the top news story of 2013, due to what they call "the most important leak of classified intelligence ever." 

The editorial boards of both New York Times and The Guardian have called for clemency for the whistleblower that revealed this uniquely valuable information to the citizenry via news media.

Mass surveillance will have enormous and enduring implications for social research, and it naturally changes the way we think about artistic freedom/freedom of expression and the nature of our participation in online environments (including online education). In the field of music, these developments are of great interest to composers and performers engaged in any creative activities that make use of the Internet, or who participate in any international projects, which applies to a large proportion of artists in the present day. For researchers, the privacy of data and our abilities to preserve anonymity in research are naturally topics of concern. 

I look forward to giving a keynote speech soon on the topic “Artistic Freedom and Online Learning in an Era of Mass Surveillance” for an interdisciplinary international conference in Sweden, entitled “Cultural Practices, Literacies and Technological Mediations. It will be held at Örebro University, March 3-5 2014. The conference is hosted by three research centers associated with the Swedish Research Council-supported national research school LIMCUL, Literacies, Multilingualism and Cultural Practices in present day society.

My speech will also become an article in a special issue of the scholarly journal Policy Futures in Education. 

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