This also made me think of educational stakeholders’ struggle for reform, and the difficulty they face in exposing those hard truths. In the U.S., we see relentless attempts by free thinking teacher groups exercising their power of public reason, yet on so many occasions their protests are squashed because of the obligation to exercise private reason and often, the basic need to eat and pay a mortgage. But, how can technology and socialmedia help these groups? What if instead of human storytellers fighting for reform, we had school objects telling an objective story gathered right from the inside?   Imagine the endless possibilities to use classroom objects as guerilla warfare in the battle for ed reform collecting data about the student and teacher performances. What stories would these objects tell about how schools kill creativity and discourage critical thinking? As a former insider, I can tell you if some school walls could talk, a lot of people would be shocked to hear the cruel stories they would tell. As a matter of fact, in many schools, copy machines already speak volumes about teachers because often teachers are assigned a unique code to track the number of copies they make. If the number exceeds the limit the school has set, the teacher often looses access to copy making until another cycle begins. However, what if that teacher was making copies for a different reason. Since it’s dangerous to generalize, and we should always consider all angles, we must consider the gray area when thinking about how blogjects might change the world to improve conditions in various aspects of life. Will the stories blogjects tell be used to spy on how we impact our environments so it can then be used against us, or will the data collected be used in our favor? But who determines what’s favorable or unfavorable? Bias is inescapable even from an object’s perspective because all human stories are subjective with varying degrees of bias. The objects who become blogjects do not have agency, humans do, so what bias will certain blogjects carry, and how will those biases help or hurt us?

If Kant were alive today, I think he would probably encourage us to participate in participatory culture to express our public use of reason. You tube and other social networking and media sharing platforms, like Twitter, are being used for political activism to both call attention and end human rights violations, the Arab Spring being a prime example.  We have a long way to go, but the technology of our own making is helping us dare to know so we can compose the metaphors of our own salvation story.