This is Prof. Mike Neary’s speech, welcoming delegates to Lincoln, where he discusses the University of Lincoln’s Student as Producer project, Charles Babbage’s steam driven Analytical Engine and Steampunk.

 

Good evening and welcome to DevXS at the University of Lincoln, taking place here in the Engine Shed.

My name is Professor Mike Neary, I am the Dean of Teaching and Learning at the University of Lincoln, and it gives me great pleasure to officially open this event.

The title for my brief talk is Student as Producer meets Pedagogy of Excess, and in presenting my talk I hope to provide an explanation for the title of the conference: DevXS.

DevXS is a BarCamp / Hackathon – style conference that recognises the progressive ideas and talent that students can bring to the development of higher education services.

At the core of DevXS is a two-day developer marathon, where students: you, are encouraged to team up and build cool things that contribute to university life. It’s about students/you sharing your ideas, mashing up data and building prototypes that improve, challenge and positively disrupt the research, teaching and learning landscapes of further and higher education.

Prizes will be awarded to the best ideas, prototypes and collaborations.

DevXS builds on the success of the JISC funded Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) project and events that it runs, such as the annual Dev8D conference.

Let me say thanks to UKOLN and all the Sponsors who helped get this event ready at Lincoln and elsewhere, especially Ric Howard, Network Engineer from ICT Services, Amazon Web Services, Xirrus, OCLC, University of Lincoln ICT Services, The Library, the School of Computing, the LNCD group at the University of Lincoln and JISC.

Throughout this conference you will be working mainly in this great hall: The Engine Shed. The Engine Shed was built by the Great Northern Railway in 1874 as covered accommodation for servicing steam engines. The Engine Shed was converted in 2004 by the University of Lincoln as a music and concert venue and assembly hall for the use of SU and students at the University of Lincoln, as well as a resource for the city of Lincoln

The Engine Shed might be regarded as a monument to an obsolete technology, but the links between the steam engine and computational machines is much closer than one might think.

We should remind ourselves that the first computational devices, designed by Charles Babbage in the early 19th century, were referred to as Engines: the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine; and that the Analytical Engine, was built to be powered by steam.

One can only imagine how the world might be different if Babbage had been able to build his Analytical Engine. Indeed, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have done just that in their jointly authored novel The Difference Engine, published in 1990. In this book they imagine a world in which steam powered computation has become ubiquitous. The book, as I am sure you know, has given impetus to the genre of reverse or retro-engineering, which calls itself SteamPunk. You should know that the SteamPunk movement holds its international conference here in Lincoln each year.

I think we should celebrate the fact that steam and the electric powered digitialised engines you are using this weekend are being brought back together by this event. I am sure (pretty sure) that Charles Babbage would approve.

But this conference is about more than engines and computers and machines, although they lie at the centre of what we/you will be doing this weekend. DevXS is about you the students, and visitors and sponsors and support staff and academics who will be working together in collaboration and co-operation as part of an academic project to further advance the production of knowledge and meaning: to build cool things that contribute to university life.

At the University of Lincoln, we are formalizing this process of collaboration between students and academics, in which students are part of the academic project of the University. The slogan for this project is Student as Producer. If you want to find out more about Student as Producer then please check out our website. Student as Producer is proud and pleased to be one of the major sponsors for this event.

But in the moment of creating Student as Producer we are also redesigning/re-engineering, deconstructing and putting Student as Producer back together: hacking it and mashing it up.

The strength of Student as Producer is that students are at the core of the University’s academic project. The limitation is that students are still students. The project that lies behind Pedagogy of Excess is to see if it is possible to intensify the student experience or student life so that students become more than students in and against the prevailing context of higher education.

We take our inspiration for Pedagogy of Excess from the student protests of 1968 in Paris and around the world. In that brief moment in time students were described as ‘being more than students’ in a period of national and international social, political and economic emergencies. In that moment the students who were protesting became ‘revealers of the general crisis’. In that moment students in Paris and around the world looked to find solutions to these emergencies, many of which extended beyond their own immediate experience of student life. They did this through establishing democratic and progressive projects across a range of educational and other social, political and economic matters. In that sense students were being and becoming in excess of what they might normally have expected from their lives as students.

We are once again in a moment of crisis, expressed as social, economic and political emergencies. One of the forms this crisis takes is a crisis of the meaning and purpose of higher education. In response to this crisis, students in the UK and around the world together with workers, academics, and activists are, once again, through their protests and occupations revealing the real nature and extent of this crisis as well as attempting to find some solutions to the crisis.

I very much hope that this conference, DevXS at the University of Lincoln can regard itself, at least in some ways, as being part of this process of revelation and resolution.

And, while you are doing all of that, make sure you have a great time.

Welcome to Lincoln. Now and Forever.