@John – This is complicated stuff. I guess the reason why putting someone inside a box is a violation of their agency is because it reduces the number of options that would otherwise be available to them. But there are implicit as well as explicit ways of doing this. That is, the trade-off for settling for (for example) wordpress.com might be an extra few hours of classtime to spend on an important academic point. The possession of that bit of academic knowledge, in turn, opens new choices to the student: the ability to read things he might not otherwise have been able to read, the ability to have new kinds of conversations, etc. Anytime we, as beings of finite attention and lifespan, choose to do one thing, it means not doing some other things. What this means for teachers is that we’re charged with making smart decisions about which kinds of agency are most important to imbue and protect in our students.

Here’s a thought: when I heard Gardner championing the cPanel sysadmin interface for individual students, I balked… I thought, dammit, they ought to be learning Unix — cPanel just being a GUI abstracting the stuff that Unix is actually doing.

But as you write here, of course that idea is a non-starter. It’s clearly not worth it to drop down to that lower level of abstraction in order to give students control of their own domains.

But hold on a moment longer, and recall that every time we close up a “black box” (like cPanel) we lose political agency. The success of Unix (speaking generically) and FLOSS more generally is precisely because they’re not black-boxed. They’re open through-and-through. So we need to at least be mindful of where we’re prepared to settle for a black-boxed solution in order to give learners the means to achieve some end.

Seems to me THAT tension is truly at the heart of Open Education.