As Amsterdam reaches to become a frontrunner in responsible tech, this pilot offers a small glimpse of what happens when the city’s future residents come together to ask not what technology can do, but what it should. In a way that is often missing from conventional education systems, four institutions built a space for dialogue and connection across educational lines and united their students in questioning the status quo.
How can we make social media a safe space for teenagers? Does a language model understand subtext the way a human being does? What would human interaction look like if everyone knew everything about everyone? Can we reinvent the internet as something not built for profit?
Shared concerns from groups of students who had mostly never shared a classroom: coders from Codam, art students from the Amsterdam University of the Arts, vocational students from the ROC van Amsterdam-Flevoland, and students from MSc MADE (the joint master's degree of Wageningen University & Research and TU Delft at AMS Institute). Over six sessions this spring, they met on the Marineterrein for a pilot called Ethics, Art, Tech & Bildung, run as a joint endeavour between the Open Knowledge Coalition, the Peer Academy and De Bildung Academie.
What the six sessions looked like
Working towards a final showcase, each evening session paired a theme with a guest and a set of exercises. Some of it read as a regular class, much of it did not. In earlier sessions, the groups engaged in a socratic dialogue, questioning their own assumptions of what ‘technology’ is. In another, led by the guest facilitator Aminata Cairo, students held a stranger's gaze for a full minute, held hands, and talked to each other. Several participants named these unfamiliar moments as the parts that stayed with them.
This unfamiliarity turned out to be the groundwork for a space of radically nuanced conclusions. A master's student writing his thesis on surveillance arrived gloomy of where the technology is heading, but sitting beside people who are openly enthusiastic about AI and social media softened him. He had been stuck, he said, in a silo of people who agreed with him; a pessimist echo chamber. Now, he is still in contact with the people that left him with a more hopeful image of the future.
A pressure-cooker for depolarization
So how did students who are normally separated end up on level ground in a matter of weeks? The subject does part of the work. Ethics is hard to be senior in. As one master's student put it, a topic was often so personal that nobody could really know much more about it than anyone else, so she could talk to everyone. A coder's technical skills and a researcher's framework count for little when the question is whether it is right to film strangers in a public square.
“It's more being in conversation as a human than as a student.”
A student from MSc MADE at AMS Institute
“It's fun to flip someone's whole mind with a project like this.”
Arda, a student from ROC van Amsterdam-Flevoland
The other half of the answer is the place: the Marineterrein. The four institutions sit close together on one site; initiators know each other. Matthijs ten Berge, who helped steer the pilot from the Amsterdam University of the Arts, put it simply: that physical closeness is what drove the collaboration forward and made it work.
“It’s also the fact that we are somewhat like an island, and so we need to learn how to learn together, how to work together, and how to live together”
Matthijs ten Berge, Amsterdam University of the Arts
Michiel Tolman, co-founder of De Bildung Academie, frames the point through the idea the course is named after. ‘Bildung’ holds that education should shape who a person becomes and how they belong to a society, as well as what they know. "A society is made up of people with vocational, applied-science or university backgrounds, who deal with each other directly or indirectly in daily life. So it's odd, to say the least, that we keep those groups so separated”, he says, “and the proof of concept to change this is here: twenty-five-plus enthusiastic participants. A handful of them were genuinely sad that the programme didn’t last longer than eight weeks."
“For me, this wasn't a class. You come here voluntarily, and honestly, I wouldn't come to school voluntarily. I came here because I was curious.”
a student from ROC van Amsterdam-Flevoland
No pressure, no diamonds
It was a first pilot, and parts of it were uncomfortable. There were no defined criteria for the final showcase, which disoriented students used to clear frameworks. Learning to sit in uncertainty and take ownership of a vague problem was (partly) the point, and it is exactly what a conventional classroom rarely asks for, according to facilitator Jenny Trimp from the Peer Academy. “Across the weeks, I really saw progress. How they started to speak up about their needs and interests; increasing their own agency within what the groups came up with for the final showcase. This can be quite an achievement, especially for some of our students. Vocational students are often overlooked, or not included, which is such a waste. The broader topic was technology, which is super relevant for them, but what they learned here were soft skills like collaboration, presenting, and examining their own opinion”.
“You get the chance to prove yourself. You're the one standing in front of the audience, the one who has to make your voice heard. That's different from a normal class, where you only listen. I learned it's not scary at all to present something.”
Israe, a student from ROC van Amsterdam-Flevoland
“I thought I'd apply a lot of my expertise. The surprise was that it counted for nothing here. It was really more about myself.”
a student from MSc MADE at AMS Institute
The disagreements were useful in the same way. An anonymous Codam student had declined the course’s initial proposal for a WhatsApp group on privacy grounds, finding it "strange, especially in this course, where ethics and technology are the whole point," and argued that cameras should be "opt-in, not opt-out". The shared group was moved to Signal, and a handful of students joined him in wanting to remain anonymous. For his final showcase experiment, he and his group argued over how far it could ethically go, and pulled back from exposing what people had told them in confidence; as the question the group was studying had turned up inside its own process. Another group split between members who wanted to warn about social media’s harms and members who wanted to defend its pleasures, and instead of resolving this, they built the disagreement into the piece. The friction, as one participant said, is part of how anything good gets made.
The showcase
During the final evening, the audience – a mix of students’ families and friends, but also educational professionals – became part of each group's experiment. One group asked everyone arriving to write down a name and a secret. Audience members who agreed were later handed a stranger's name and sent to find out what they could about that person online. It landed when it turned personal: one visitor surfaced another's entire Pinterest board, every saved scrap of taste in interiors and style, and its owner said it felt strange to be visible in this way to someone who didn't, in fact, know her.
A second group, on what separates people from machines, had the audience draw love by hand and then showed how an image generator renders the same word, asking what physical presence does that a screen cannot. Another group staged a quiz: the audience did their best at interpreting memes while the sixteen to eighteen year old vocational students graded the answers; the message to parents in the room being to stay curious and engage in ethical conversations with their children.
What’s next?
There is a reason to take this pilot seriously now. Technology is moving faster than our shared ability to make sense of it; and the habit of sorting people into boxes – by assumed characteristics and abilities – is not weakening. A generation that can sit across those lines and learn, work, and live with one another is worth more than it sounds.
“Very rarely, as a society or as a people, do we stop and ponder whether using technology the way we use it is right, which is what we did during the course.”
a student from MSc MADE at AMS Institute
“MBO, HBO and WO students are seen as very different from each other by society. But it shouldn't be that way. Collaboration between them works perfectly fine.”
Sillah, a student from ROC van Amsterdam-Flevoland
The pilot showed how it could be done. Four institutions with very different educational missions and student populations enabled the participants to co-develop alternative courses of action surrounding an abstract societal challenge. At the intersection of art, tech, science, and ethics, this pilot made a case for preparing students for society as much as for any single field. What it has not yet shown is how this first attempt could become a regularly recurring custom, or whether something like this can live inside each institution's own programmes rather than beside them. That is the more pressing question, and it is the one the Open Knowledge Coalition is determined to tackle.
Are you interested in a follow-up of this pilot, or do you want to contribute to it? Please reach out to Maike Simmens (maike.simmens@ams-institute.org).
Acknowledgements
The Open Knowledge Coalition (Open Kenniscoalitie) is a long-term partnership set up by three educational institutions on the Marineterrein – the Amsterdam University of the Arts, Codam Coding College and AMS Institute – to help develop the site into an innovation district for the learning city, organised around art, technology and science. For the Ethics, Art, Tech & Bildung pilot, it worked with two further contributors: the Peer Academy and De Bildung Academie.
Codam Coding College is a tuition-free software-engineering school in Amsterdam and the Dutch campus of the global 42 network, which runs with no teachers, no classes and no tuition fee. Instead of lectures and timetables, it uses a project-based, gamified curriculum in which students review each other's work, and it is open to everyone aged 18 and over, without prior qualifications.
AMS Institute (the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions) is a research institute founded in 2014 by Delft University of Technology, Wageningen University & Research and MIT. It develops and tests advanced solutions for the challenges of rapidly urbanising regions, using the city of Amsterdam as a living lab. Its students in the pilot came from its master's programme, Metropolitan Analysis, Design and Engineering (MSc MADE).
The Amsterdam University of the Arts is an institution for higher arts education made up of six academies: the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, the Netherlands Film Academy, the Academy of Theatre and Dance, the Reinwardt Academy, the Academy of Architecture and the Breitner Academy, spanning fine art and design, music, film, theatre, dance, museology, architecture and arts education. On the Marineterrein, it runs the AHK Culture Club.
The Peer Academy is part of the ROC van Amsterdam-Flevoland, the region's vocational (mbo) institution. It trains students for innovative roles such as Peer Educator, Peer Coach and Impact Maker, in which they help shape education themselves and contribute to social change, working as equal partners on societal questions that directly affect young people, such as mental health and social safety.
De Bildung Academie is a bottom-up educational initiative founded in Amsterdam by students and lecturers, out of dissatisfaction with what regular education left out. It offers "Bildung": education that develops students into socially engaged individuals who think critically, act with empathy and can weigh moral questions, not only acquire knowledge, with students turning what they learn into a concrete project.
The Open Knowledge Coalition would like to thank everyone for their contribution to this pilot, in particular Aminata Cairo, Anne Lemmens, Cindy Vekemans, Clemens Driessen, Ferial Saatchi-Sabelis, Gabriela Acosta Camacho, Janneke Gulen, Jantine Hendriks, Jenny Trimp, Jilles Slingerland, Julia Moore, Leonard Bukenya, Linda Tieleman, Maike Simmes, Michiel Tolman, Rutger Gommers, Victoria Ous, Willem Dieleman; as well as the 25+ students from Codam, Amsterdam University of the Arts, AMS Institute, and the ROC van Amsterdam-Flevoland / Peer Academy.